The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-s

The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-said-she-said between a scientist and a journalist, the latter of whom has made a career out of exaggerating and inventing errors in climate change science in order to sell papers. True, it is not a complete and unambiguous debunking in that there still exists some slight bit of wiggle room, but that's not my point at all-- if the author had really cared about representing the subject matter in a way that reflects reality, she would have made a much weaker claim, or at the very least, she would have acknowledged how incredibly poorly supported her claim really was. As for political pressure in climate research, well, that's a rather extraordinary claim, given that there has been documented rather a lot of political pressure in the opposite direction, such as the governor of the state of Alaska telling the researchers at the largest university in the state that they needed to work to prove environmentalists wrong. No doubt one can always find small and local examples of individual PIs acting inappropriately-- that happens in all fields-- but to show that there is widespread political pressure to produce positive AGW studies would take quite a bit of evidence. To me, this argument holds about as much water as the creationist argument that they're being censored. If there's a widespread rejection of papers documenting anti-AGW studies, it may in fact be because they fail to reflect reality.