Uh oh, another “climategate” like moment is upon us as the law of unintended consequences kicks in. As Dr. Roger Pielke put it:
Appears that Bengtsson can play hardball too.
Plus there is an editorial by Dr. Matt Ridley saying “This bullying of climate sceptics must end“. Here is the front page of The Times for Friday May 16th, a link to the article follows.
Here is the full article:
Scientists in cover-up of ‘damaging’ climate view
Research which heaped doubt on the rate of global warming was deliberately suppressed by scientists because it was “less than helpful” to their cause, it was claimed last night.
In an echo of the infamous “Climategate” scandal at the University of East Anglia, one of the world’s top academic journals rejected the work of five experts after a reviewer privately denounced it as “harmful”.
Full article at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4091344.ece
Ridley’s essay:
This bullying of climate-science sceptics must end
When did demonising your opponents become so acceptable?
Lennart Bengtsson is about as distinguished as climate scientists get. His decision two weeks ago to join the academic advisory board (on which I also sit, unremunerated) of Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation was greeted with fury by many fellow climate scientists. Now in a McCarthyite move — his analogy — they have bullied him into resigning by refusing to collaborate with him unless he leaves.
Full article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/thunderer/article4091200.ece
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I have yet to read any ‘SCIENTIFIC’ explanation that supports the ‘greenhouse GAS’ theory. Current data shows that CO2 and H2O most certainly absorb radiation at well defined frequencies. Also, if these gases are hot enough, can radiate at those frequencies. Direct sunlight is the only source of high frequency radiation for the upper frequency bands of CO2 and H2O but since these gas molecules are MUCH COOLER than the peak temperature of those radiation bands will pass some of that energy to other atmospheric gas molecules via conduction and the remainder of the energy will be radiated away at the lower frequency bands until the molecules are back to the local air temperature whence they continue cooling the atmosphere via their lowest radiation levels.
The overall effect is to SHEILD the surface from those specific bands of high energy radiation FROM THE SUN. A cooling effect.
At night the surface is radiating UP through the atmosphere but as the CO2 and H2O molecules are already radiating proportional to their local air temperature are unable to absorb that radiation from the surface. It is possible that some surface photons are absorbed but are usually re-radiated without effecting the overall energy level of the GAS molecule. This same argument applies to the surface. If it is already radiating a band of frequencies it is unable to reabsorb those same frequencies from any other source.
When did demonising your opponents become so acceptable?
When it became profitable.
I think you demean Senator McCarthy by lumping him in with these charlatans. (Mini sarc)
He was likely suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SADS) alcohol poisoning or Lyme’s disease, all common in the excessively cold climate from which he hailed. While infamous for the vehemence of his anti-communist views, he was a product of his time, and was highly respected by other rabid anti-communists such as the Kennedy family. He was a good friend of Joseph Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy not only worked for Senator McCarthy, but he asked Joe McCarthy to be the Godfather of his first child. Thus Katherine Kennedy Townsend’s Godfather was Joseph P. McCarthy. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Richard111 says:
May 15, 2014 at 10:26 pm
Now that’s interesting, I’ve never heard it expressed that way before.
I’ll have to think about that…
(wish you’d posted a link)
It’s getting some coverage via the interwebs!
https://bitly.com/T8e0ZQ+ “This Bitlink is popular right now! It’s been clicked 464 times in the last hour.”
If that’s The Times leader then there’s editorial support. Looks like the UK is turning AGW into a left / right wing political issue with no science involved. Bonus!
RichardIII, you are using a mixture of arguments 3 and 4 of Roy Spencer’s 10 arguments you should never use,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/01/top-ten-skeptical-arguments-that-dont-hold-water/
Somehow I doubt this is going to unravel Obama’s power of executive order, and Obamacare for the Climate is just around the corner.
to keep the pages filled uk press big people up then tear them down. Maybe they decided climate no longer scares people so time to tear them down?
top story front page of the times is not going to be gossip.
The Times is not normally associated with AGW skepticism – so the readers’ comments are interesting. It seems the more BS “the team” produce, the less people believe it. I hope.
Lennart Bengtsson, IMHO, needs to grow a pair, and stand up for his scientific principles. He could make Galileo proud if he did, and maybe lead the climate science cause back to scientific skepticism it has abandoned.
History will judge the Global Warming CO2 Alarmists as the modern-era equivalent of the 1616 Vatican Inquisition that deemed a heliocentric solar system as heretical, and eventually punished Galileo by imprisoning him in 1632 until he died in 1644. Even in 1616, the Vatican declared heliocentric books as banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas.
Sound like today? You betcha, with today’s media and Alarmists trying to cut off open debate on their climate change orthodoxy.
FREE 🙂 Non-paywalled dailymail.co.uk link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630023/Study-suggesting-global-warming-exaggerated-rejected-publication-respected-journal-helpful-climate-cause-claims-professor.html
DrudgeReport.com is now *leading* with this Times story, with a huge headline:
GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS COVERED UP SKEPTIC’S ‘DAMAGING’ REVIEW
Screenshot: http://s6.postimg.org/uwszq1d69/image.jpg
This is a lot bigger story now than just Bengtsson being intimidated off the GWPF board, since now the story includes one of his papers being politically rejected from a top journal, as Oracle’s non-paywalled version outlines:
“Prof Bengtsson’s paper suggests that the Earth’s environment might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.
If he and his four co-authors are correct, it would mean that carbon dioxide and other pollutants are having a far less severe impact on climate than green activists would have us believe.
The research, if made public, would be a huge challenge to the finding of the UN’s Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.
The paper suggested that the climate might be less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September, and recommended that more work be carried out ‘to reduce the underlying uncertainty’.
The five contributing scientists submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters – a highly regarded journal – but were told it had been rejected. A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process reportedly wrote: ‘It is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’
Prof Bengtsson, 79, said it was ‘utterly unacceptable’ to advise against publishing a paper on the political grounds.
He said: ‘It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views. The reality hasn’t been keeping up with the [computer] models.
‘If people are proposing to do major changes to the world’s economic system we must have much more solid information.’”
So according to The Daily Mail story the peer reviewers said “… the paper contained errors …. “, and that is the reason it wasn’t published.
So what were these errors?
“The five contributing scientists submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters – a highly regarded journal – but were told it had been rejected. A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process reportedly wrote: ‘It is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’”
I would agree that this is an unacceptable reason for rejecting a paper. The authors should immediately publish all of the referee’s reports (there would have been more than one) to provide full evidence. The reports should be published completely, and in full, to avoid accusations of selective quotation.
About 5 years ago I gave a two hour lecture on the sceptical view of AGW to 100 UK university students in the final year of their journalise degree. Apart from from one angry young man, who got frustrated when he couldn’t refute my points (he was checking on his laptop as I spoke), it went very well. I even got an enthusiastic round of applause!
I did suggest that one day they might start writing many articles on the collapse of AGW.
Atmospheric Science’s Well was poisoned about 50 years ago by a basic scientific mistake, the claim by Sagan that a planetary surface emits to its atmosphere net IR equivalent to a black body in radiative equilibrium with a sink at absolute zero. This is used to justify the view that lapse rate is caused by that IR being absorbed by GHGs, instead of gravity, and the ‘Extended GHE’.
The likes of Bengtsson and Lindzen were taught it. They taught the present generation of Atmospheric Physicists. Yet I along with every experienced process engineer and experimental physicist on the Planet know it to be wrong from experiment.
It’s the end game. Real data show our atmosphere is not warming despite continued increase of [CO2]. There is no ‘Atmospheric Hot Spot’ with associated accumulation of latent heat energy. The response by this deluded establishment, funded by Obama’s $billions, is to invent more fake physics, the ‘missing heat’ does not exist, and to ostracise anyone who breaches their omerta.
This is not science.
Typo ‘journalism’.
Cant take down the politicians but you can take down what they believe in Murdock and the rest of the British press launch another kick back against Leveson.
Go get em boys
I’m cool with that. However, it may become necessary in future if they continue to use the D word. They have become extreme in their language, asked us to rub asbesttos on our faces, call for imprisonment, capital punishment etc. All I did was pose a simple questions as to who qualifies as a den***? 😉
Sorry, I should have said in terms of spread and brand recognition.
Would that be the Duke or his son? 😉
Anyway, that’s for conspiracy theorists not me. She died in a genuine car accident. Neil Armstrong actually stepped foot on the moon as attested by the existence of AGW sceptical astronauts. Darwin was a genius too. 😉
Jeef :
Your post at May 15, 2014 at 11:14 pm says in total
Say what!?
In what way is this an indication that “the UK is turning AGW into a left / right wing political issue with no science involved”?
And if that strange assertion were true then in what way could that possibly be a “bonus!” except for proponents of the AGW-scare?
There is no scientific evidence that supports the AGW-scare; none, zilch, nada.
There is scientific evidence which provides great doubt to the AGW-scare;
e.g. global warming is not a twenty-first century phenomenon because there has been no global warming this century although atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise and this refutes projections the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made in the twentieth century.
The international promotion of the AGW-scare was defeated in 2009 when a successor to the Kyoto Protocol was prevented. But individual nations are continuing to adopt policies in response to the scare. Adopting the AGW-scare as “a left / right wing political issue with no science involved” locks the scare into the political process and, thus, prevents the scare from being defeated by the physical evidence.
However, as several WUWT threads demonstrate, there are right-wingers who want to pretend the AGW-scare is a left / right wing political issue because that pretence is a tool for them to promote their political philosophies. They do not want discussion of the science because the science could defeat the AGW-scare which they want to continue to use as a tool.
People from all parts of the political spectrum oppose the AGW-scare because they care about the harm being inflicted by policies which are justified by the scare. And we who oppose the AGW-scare have science on our side.
Indeed, the reported censorship of scientific papers is because proponents of the AGW-scare understand that we who oppose the AGW-scare have science on our side.
Richard
More of article here: http://www.thegwpf.org/scientists-in-cover-up-of-damaging-climate-view/
Now also on the Telegraph website.
It seems to be getting some traction in the UK.