Since that post, they seem to have shifted gears a bit: They’ve started calling their accusers “shrill”. They address a piece of timing of personal e-mails with Joe Romm while ignoring Paul Krugman, and they link to an unnamed “well-known environmental advocacy group” that is actually the Union of Concerned Scientists. This is pretty much exactly the same tactics used years ago when people started attacking Krugman for complaining about the economics of the Bush tax cuts – they ignored the complaints and called the accuser “shrill”.

On a related note, the majority of their third-party defenders that I’ve seen are using similar smokescreen defenses. For instance, The American Spectator essentially said “why are all these liberals complaining now when they didn’t complain about the abortion chapter in the first Freakonomics”, which A) doesn’t defend Levitt and Dubner, and B) ignores the flak Superfreakonomics has received from conservatives, such as Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve been following all of this as it developed; my name should link to the list I’ve compiled so far, and all the sources for the above claims.