James Powell's response to Mark Boslough regarding the destruction of Tall el-Hammam
Sodom and Gomorrah afire, by Jacob de Wet 11, from Wikipedia James Powell , an eminent geologist, now retired, has just published an excoriating review of Mark Boslough's criticism of the recent Tall el-Hammam paper , one of the most widely read scientific papers of the last decade. This paper argues that a cosmic impact destroyed Tall el-Hammam circa 1650 BCE. This event might have been remembered in Biblical terms as the destruction of Sodom. Rather than critiquing this paper in the usual way through publishing a peer-reviewed rebuttal, Mark instead published his ad-hominem-laden review in the Skeptical Enquirer, a magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Enquiry (CSI) (oddly, it has the tagline "The Magazine for Science and Reason"). Much of his article was a targeted attack against a member of the Comet Research Group, Allen West. You can see much the same kind of attack on Allen on the talk page of Wikipedia's article on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypo