The editor of ThinkProgress, the Soros-funded attack dog site, has been caught boasting to a billionaire liberal donor about how a smear campaign by one of his minions helped damage the career of a reputable climate scientist.

In the latest Wikileak, Judd Legum of ThinkProgress is revealed to have written in a 2014 email to green activist billionaire and Hillary Clinton bagman Tom Steyer:

I think it’s fair say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538. He would be providing important cover for climate deniers backed by Silver’s very respected brand. But because of our work, he is not.

Legum is referring to an incident which caused a big stir in both new media and climate science circles, not long after the launch of Nate Silver’s 538.

We covered this story at the time under the headline Now Nate Silver Capitulates, Throws Staffer To Green Activists – because that’s basically what happened. Amid much fanfare, Silver had set up his journalism site FiveThirtyEight – which made a big deal of being “data-driven” and therefore above the political bias of other web-based news media. One of his star writer recruits was climate expert Roger Pielke Jr. A former Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, Pielke is not an out-and-out climate sceptic but a self-described “luke-warmer.” That is, he believes in the science of man-made global warming. But he doesn’t believe in exaggerating the case.

Pielke’s mistake was to write a piece for FiveThirtyEight stating what he thought was a fairly unarguable, scientifically grounded truth: that there has been no increase in “extreme weather events” as a result of supposed man-made climate change.

Almost instantly, Pielke found himself viciously attacked from a number of quarters, everywhere from The Guardian and The Week to the Columbia Journalism review, not to mention FiveThreeEight’s comments section, where he was accused of writing “propaganda for big oil.”

Pielke Jr was so mortified that he never wrote on the subject of climate change for the site again and was subsequently dropped as a writer by Silver.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we now know that the dark agent behind this monstering, was Climate Progress – the eco-fascist sub-section of ThinkProgress, run by Joe Romm, devoted to promulgating green propaganda and smearing sceptics.

Unsurprisingly, it now emerges that one of Climate Progress’s donors is Tom “rhymes with liar” Steyer, whose epic disgustingness I have previously chronicled here and here.

No doubt Steyer – and Soros – more than get their money’s worth: smearing and misinformation, after all, are what political attack dog sites are paid to do.

The key question is, though, how does this square with the environmental movement’s claim to hold the moral high ground?

If the “science” is as settled as it frequently claims, why is it necessary to orchestrate attacks on any scientist who speaks even slightly out of turn?