The Spectator on the Antarctic Ice Capades

Nicolas Lewis and Matt Ridley have written a scathing article in the Spectator (UK) regarding the treatment of O’Donnell et al during the peer review and post peer review process.

I’ve been privileged with receiving an advance copy. Since this is a subscription only magazine, I can’t show you the entire article, but I can say, I think they got it right. There is however, an op-ed  by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, which you can read in full here.

I expect there will be some damage control in Real Climate tomorrow, or perhaps a letter of rebuttal to the Spectator, or both.

The Team, and climate science in general, comes off looking badly. Here’s an excerpt:

“Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed  it – perhaps because of fear that doing so might harm their careers. As the title of Richard Bean’s new play – The Heretic – at the Royal Court hints, young scientists going into climate studies these days are a bit like young theologians in Elizabethan England. They quickly learn that funding and promotion dries up if you express heterodox views, or doubt the scripture. The scripture, in this case, being the assembled reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

…

“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that `it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity  underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the (absurd) remark: `Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century.’Likewise, a paper In Science last month linking periods of migration in European history with cooler weather stated: `Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.’ Sceptical climatologist Pat Michaels pointed out that the sentence would make more sense with `counteracting’ removed. 

Science as a philosophy is a powerful, but fragile thing. In the case of climate, it is now in conflict with science as an institution.”