Elisa de Ranieri, editor-in-chief, Nature Communications, David Gevaux, chief “physical-sciences” editor, Fiona Gillespie, managing editor, Jasper Franke, associate editor, “Earth team”, Alexander Michael Petersen, asst. professor, engineering, Emmanuel M. Vincent, “climate communications”, Anthony LeRoy Westerling
15 August 2019
Mesdames, gentlemen,
Fraud, breach of right of privacy and libel by Nature Communications
My attention has been drawn to a purported “peer-reviewed” “research” “study” for which the addressees hereof are jointly and severally responsible. Publication of the purported “study”, actively and widely marketed on the homepage of Nature Communications (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html) as well as on the co-authors’ websites and curricula vitae, is unlawful at criminal as well as at civil law.
The purported “study”, entitled Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians was prominently posted online by Nature Communications at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09959-4.
The journal, its editors named supra and the three authors of the purported “study” are guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud by misrepresentation and by abuse of public trust on multiple counts evidenced later herein. Unless within seven days I shall have received from each of the addressees a written apology for their role in the fraud and an undertaking that the offending “study” has been removed permanently from all forms of circulation and will not be reissued under any circumstances or in any form, I shall report the fraud to the Serious Fraud Office, to the Chief Constable of South Gloucestershire, and to Interpol, and shall request that the addressees hereof be added to the list of those under investigation for scientific and financial fraud in connection with the systemic and profitable international over-promotion of the imagined problem of “global warming”.
The said defendants are guilty of breach of my right to privacy in terms of Art. 8, European Human Rights Convention in their widespread circulation without having obtained or even sought my consent (which is for the avoidance of doubt withheld) of a list, including my name, of those described on the Nature Communications homepage as “climate deniers” and in the offending “study” variously as “denialists”, “contrarians” and other derogatory terms calculated in context to lead readers to hold me in hatred, ridicule and contempt. I require within seven days a written undertaking from each addressee that the list will not be further circulated, that each addressee will at once contact all those into whose hands he or she has allowed it to fall and instruct them to destroy the list and to pass on the instruction to all to whom they may have distributed it.
The said defendants are guilty of libel calculated to be to my detriment on multiple counts evidenced later herein. Unless within seven days I shall have received from each of the addressees a written apology in terms entirely acceptable to me as well as an undertaking that the libels herein complained of will not be repeated, and unless within that time the apology and undertaking shall have replaced the offending “study” on the homepage of Nature Communications, I may without further notice institute proceedings for libel against the said defendants, with applications for service furth of the jurisdiction where necessary.
The rebarbative marketing blurb for the purported “study”, prominently accessible via a direct link from the homepage of Nature Communications, reads as follows:
“Climate deniers get more media play than scientists: study
“Climate deniers have garnered far more media attention than prominent climate scientists over the years, fuelling public confusion and slowing the response to global warming, researchers reported Tuesday.
“From 2000 through 2016, hundreds of academics, business people and politicians who doubted global warming or attributed rising temperatures to ‘natural’ causes got 50% more ink than an equal number of expert scientists, according to a study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal.
“In reality, there has long been overwhelming agreement among climate scientists that global warming – caused mainly by burning fossil fuels – poses a major threat to civilisation and much of life on Earth.
“An increase of only 1 C° had triggered rising seas and a crescendo of deadly extreme weather, and Earth is on track to heat up another three degrees by century’s end.
“‘Climate change contrarians have successfully organised a strong voice within politics and science communication,’ noted the authors, led by Alexander Petersen of the University of California at Merced.
“‘It also undermines the credible authority of career climate change scientists and reinforces the trend of climate change contrarians presiding over public scientific discourse.’
“Over the last year, public concern over global warming has grown dramatically, sparked in part by an October UN report warning that only a wholesale overhaul of the global economy and consumption patterns can forestall climate chaos.
“In Europe, green parties running on a platform of climate action gaining nearly two dozen seats in EU parliamentary elections. Climate protesters drawing from the civil disobedience playbook of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, meanwhile, have spilled into the streets.
“Sowing doubt
“In the United States, a call for climate action has become a litmus test among Democrat candidates for president, and many young people have rallied around the legislative initiative known as the Green New Deal.
“A handful of western governments have pledged to slash carbon emissions to ‘net zero’ by mid-century.
“But even today, established media continue to provide platforms for dubious or discredited assertions about global warming.
“Last week, for example, US business magazine Forbes published an article on its website entitled Global warming? An Israeli astrophysicist provides alternative view that is not easy to reject.
“The ‘alternative view’ – that warming is caused by the Sun and not CO2 emissions – is thoroughly discredited, and the magazine was compelled within hours to remove the piece.
“In testimony last month before the US Senate that took on confessional tones, long-time Republican Party strategist Frank Luntz revealed a key moment nearly 20 years ago in the campaign to blunt action against global warming.
“‘You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate,’ he told party operatives in a memo during George W. Bush’s first term in office.
“The disquieting term ‘global warming’, he further suggested, should be replaced with ‘climate change’.
“‘I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,’ he told a Senate committee.
In the new study, Petersen and colleagues scanned 100,000 news items published from 2000 through 2016 for bylines, citations and mentions of 386 scientists, and 386 ‘contrarians’.
“‘Tallying across all media sources we find climate change contrarian media visibility to be 49% greater than climate change visibility,’ they wrote.
The imbalance was made worse by the amplifying effect of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, they added.”
The blurb gives rise to the following counts of fraud:
1. The defendants’ statement that “In reality, there has long been overwhelming agreement among climate scientists that global warming – caused mainly by burning fossil fuels – poses a major threat to civilisation and much of life on Earth” constitutes fraud by misrepresentation and fraud by abuse of public trust, contrary to the Fraud Act 2006, in that 1) the official “consensus” proposition as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says no more than that recent global warming is chiefly anthropogenic, and says nothing about whether it is dangerous; and 2) of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers on global warming and related topics published after peer review in the learned journals of climate and related sciences during the 21 years 1991-2011, only 41 papers, or 0.3%, stated their agreement even to that milquetoast “consensus” proposition (Legates et al. 2015); and 3) the factually false notion of a “consensus” among “experts”, the notion that underlies, underpins and animates the entire fraud, is a conflation of the ancient logical fallacies of argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam (the headcount and reputation fallacies); and 4) the imagined (and imaginary) “major threat to civilization and much of life on Earth” is not occurring, as the defendants well know, for the rate of global warming from 1850 to 2011, the year to which IPCC data were updated for the most recent Assessment Report, was only one-third of the medium-term rate originally predicted by IPCC in 1990; and 5) tens of millions die each year for lack of electrical power, because the World Bank in 2010, citing “global warming” as its pretext, ceased to lend to developing countries for the installation of coal-fired power, yet the defendants, in the offending blurb, made no mention of the fact that it is global-warming policy, not global warming itself, that is the real killer, and 6) the defendants made no mention of the numerous benefits of anthropogenic CO2 enrichment, not the least of which are the availability of life-saving electrical power and the 7-15% increase in net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide thanks to CO2 fertilization.
2. The defendants’ statement that “An increase of only 1 C° had triggered rising seas and a crescendo of deadly extreme weather” constitutes fraud by misrepresentation and fraud by abuse of public trust, contrary to the Fraud Act 2006, in that 2) according to the Envisat satellite, the most capable sea-level monitoring satellite, which operated from 2004-2012, the rate of sea-level rise over the period of operation was equivalent to 1.5 inches/century, which, within the error margin, is no sea-level rise at all; 3) according to Cazenave et al. (2009), sea level actually fell between 2003 and 2008, but was reported as having risen on the basis of a “glacial isostatic adjustment” which, whether justified or not (probably not) does not and did not constitute an actual sea-level rise; 3) the intercalibration errors between the different laser-altimetry satellites are larger than the sea-level rise the satellites purport to measure; 4) careful comparison of tide-gauge and satellite-altimetry sea-level records worldwide has demonstrated that everywhere the true rate of eustatic sea-level rise, after careful correction for local isostatic displacements of the seabed, is only 1.1 mm/year, equivalent to just over 4 inches per century; 5) a sea-level rise of 4 inches per century is half the rate of rise observed in the 20th century.
3. The defendants’ statement that “An increase of only 1 C° had triggered … a crescendo of deadly extreme weather” constitutes fraud by misrepresentation and by abuse of public trust, contrary to the Fraud Act 2006, in that the defendants knew that 1) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had stated repeatedly and explicitly in its 2013 Fifth Assessment Report and in its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Weather that there was little or no evidence for what the defendants chose to mischaracterize as a “crescendo of deadly extreme weather”; 2) the global land area under drought has fallen throughout the past 30 years (Hao et al. 2014); 3) the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index shows a decline in the frequency, intensity and duration of hurricanes and of tropical storms worldwide (Dr Ryan Maue, Florida State University); 4) loss of life from weather-related events has plummeted throughout the recent decades; 5) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its 2013 and 2012 reports cited at 1) supra, states that there is no evidence for a greater risk of flooding or rainstorms; 5) the acreages burned in forest fires have declined monotonically in each decade of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st; 6) ocean “acidification” is a scientific impossibility under anything like modern conditions, for the ocean is pronouncedly alkaline and dealkalinization, in the few locations where it has been measured, is proceeding at a hardly life-threatening 0.2 pH units per century.
4. The defendants’ statement that “Earth is on track to heat up another three degrees by century’s end” constitutes fraud by misrepresentation and by abuse of public trust, contrary to the Fraud Act 2006, in that the defendants knew that 1) the observed rate of global warming from 1850-2011 is one-third of the medium-term rate originally predicted by IPCC in 1990; 2) the observed period rate of global warming is well below half the expected rate consistent with official estimates of net anthropogenic radiative forcing and of radiative imbalance over the period; 3) the headline predicted global-warming rate of 3.35 K per CO2 doubling (based on data in Andrews et al. 2012) is almost two and a half times the rate deducible from the system-gain factors implicit in 21st-century projections even under the deliberately extreme RCP8.5 scenario.
5. The defendants’ statement that “The ‘alternative view’ – that warming is caused by the Sun and not CO2 emissions – is thoroughly discredited …” constitutes fraud by misrepresentation and by abuse of public trust, contrary to the Fraud Act 2006, in that the defendants knew that numerous papers on solar activity, such as Hathaway & Wilson 2004, show a very clear increase in solar activity from 1925-1995, to levels not seen in the past 300 years, and that this increase in solar activity is linked to an increase in total solar irradiance and hence in global temperatures, and that since 2004 the datasets of total solar irradiance have been altered with the effect of removing much of that increase in solar activity from the record, and that at least one of the handful of solar physicists responsible for the alterations said they had been made so as to prevent “deniers” from pointing out that much, if not all, of the global warming of recent decades was attributable to solar activity.
The blurb gives rise to at least the following counts of libel, given the widespread circulation of my name by the defendants on the list of those whom they describe as “deniers”, a term calculated to invite invidious comparison with Holocaust denial:
1. The defendants’ use of the word “denial” twice (once in the headline and once in the opening sentence of the blurb) – constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I and others on the list circulated by the defendants deny well-established scientific facts, when – as will be self-evident from the well-referenced paragraphs outlining the defendants’ frauds supra – my objections to the Party Line climate to which the defendants choose to adhere are not, as their adherence thereto is, merely political, but instead rigorously scientific.
2. The defendants’ use of the phrase “Sowing doubt” in a prominent subheading in the blurb constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I among others named on the list circulated by the defendants are adopting a political stance opposite to that of the defendants, and that we are dishonestly causing deliberate confusion in the public mind, when in fact my own work on climate, which includes numerous peer-reviewed publications in leading journals somehow not identified in the defendants’ careless purported “study”, raises genuine and profound scientific and economic concerns about the Party Line to which the defendants adhere.
3. The defendants’ use of the phrase “dubious or discredited assertions about global warming” in the blurb constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I among others named on the list circulated by the defendants are dishonestly attempting to mislead the public, and in its deliberately false implication that all of my published statements about the climate have been discredited. Let us take a single example: I am on record as having pointed out that, in control theory, the branch of engineering physics from which climatology borrows feedback method, such feedback processes as may subsist in a feedback-moderated dynamical system must perforce respond not only to any perturbations of the input signal but also to the entire reference signal, which is the sum of the input signal and any perturbations. However, it is not difficult to calculate that the 3.35 K official midrange estimate of Charney sensitivity in the CMIP5 models (Andrews op. cit.) is predicated on the assumption that, while the 10 K directly-forced or reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases is imagined to engender a 22.5 K feedback response (i.e., a response more than twice itself), the 274 K emission temperature that would be present in the absence of any greenhouse gases would engender a feedback response of zero. That is a large and self-evident but hitherto overlooked contradiction within the Party Line to which the defendants inexpertly adhere. Resolving that contradiction constrains Charney sensitivity to between 1 and 1.4 K – an interval entirely below the [1.5, 4.7] K interval currently imagined by IPCC and the CMIP5 models. The corrected warming, therefore, will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial. Even if it were the fact that official climatology’s “consensus” of “experts” had hitherto considered [1.5, 4.7] K to be a reasonable interval, the “consensus” would be incorrect and the experts – to that extent, at any rate, inexpert. The defendants have carelessly – and, in the event, libellously – assumed that the Party Line is in all respects correct, when in fact, in at least the respects outlined herein, it is demonstrably incorrect. The defendants’ libel is thus fundamentally dishonest and deliberately so, in that none of them has sufficient expertise in climatology or in any related subject to pronounce as they have pronounced to the effect that the Party Line must be in all material respects correct, and yet they have seen fit to pontificate in a fashion calculated deliberately to damage the reputations of those on the list they have carelessly circulated, including my name.
4. The defendants’ telling of the story of a Republican who had at first opposed the Party Line on climate and has now changed his mind was calculated, in association with the list of names including mine that the defendants had widely circulated, to convey the false impression that we too ought to confess our past sins and toe the Party Line to which they so faithfully and yet so inexpertly adhere, and to leave readers with the notion that it was only wilful dishonesty on our part that was leading us to make the allegedly “dubious” (but carefully unspecified) statements of which the defendants accused us in their prominently-circulated blurb.
The purported “study” contrasted “386 prominent contrarians” with “386 expert scientists”, and concluded that “professional mainstream sources” of news had been subjected to “crowding out” by –
“the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.”
The above passage constitutes libel of me as well as others named in the list circulated by the defendants, in that we are held to be guilty of deliberate “disinformation”. In fact, as the numerous references supra demonstrate, I have good scientific and economic reason to disagree with certain aspects of the Party Line to which the defendants adhere. What is more, the above passage constitutes evidence of malice, in that the defendants declare their determination to prevent those of us who have genuine scientific and economic doubts about the Party Line from gaining access to the news media in future. This and other evidences of malice on the part of the defendants, including the defendants’ circulation of the list of names including mine, removes the protection granted by Parliament to those who commit libels in “peer-reviewed” “studies”.
The “study” asserts that –
“Since the early 2000s there has been little disagreement among scientific experts over the fundamental evidence supporting the existence, origin and societal significance of anthropogenic climate change. Yet, while an anthropogenic cause is supported by an overwhelming majority of climate change scientists, climate change contrarians have successfully organized a strong voice within politics and science communication in the United States.
The above passage is further evidence of the fraud by which the defendants, in concert with others worldwide, have sought falsely to maintain that there is a “consensus” among scientists – a “consensus” that they know does not in fact exist and that they know would be meaningless even if it did exist, for science is not done by “consensus” among “experts”.
“Historians of science have detailed the political origins of the climate change contrarian movement, documenting how its strategic efforts succeeded in distorting the science-based narrative on multiple fronts, e.g., by promoting the idea that there is a lack of scientific consensus concerning anthropogenic climate change, despite the fact that objective research has found little evidence for such a claim.”
The above passage is a further instance of the defendants’ fraudulent statement to the effect that the actually non-existent scientific “consensus” on climate change exists. In fact, there are thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed papers on climate and related topics that challenge various key aspects of the Party Line to which the defendants adhere. The defendants know these papers exist. Yet they have received financial grants to write their fraudulent paper suggesting that these papers do not exist. To take one example, the Party Line to which the defendants inexpertly adhere states that there was no mediaeval warm period. Yet on this topic alone the investigating authorities are already aware of more than 1000 papers demonstrating that the mediaeval warm period was real, was global and was warmer than the present. In many other subject areas related to climate change, thousands upon thousands of papers question every aspect of the Party Line. Indeed, in mitigation economics the overwhelming preponderance of papers – including papers by me – make it clear that the welfare loss from attempted mitigation of global warming exceeds by orders of magnitude the welfare benefit that might be expected.
The above cited passage also reinforces the libel of me and others named in the list circulated by the defendants, in that it accuses us of “distortion” of the “science-based narrative”, when in fact my disagreement with the Party Line to which the defendants adhere is scientific, and soundly-based at that, as the defendants well know.
The purported “study” goes on to assert that that –
“Public confusion over science affects various other domains, in addition to climate change communication, and requires a better understanding of the human, social, and technological factors that facilitate widespread disinformation efforts.”
Note how assiduously, deliberately, and, therefore, maliciously the defendants repeat the word “disinformation” in a manner calculated to act to the detriment of my reputation and of that of others on the list of names of “denialists / deniers / contrarians” widely circulated by the defendants.
The purported “study” also talks of –
“… media coverage that is disproportionate to the authority and number of scientists holding the consensus viewpoint. Recent research highlights the ramifications of this problem, finding that the acceptance of climate change increases (respectively decreases) with consumption of media content that acknowledges (respectively dismisses) climate-change realities, other factors being equal. Susceptibility to information manipulation may continue to be a serious problem until society fully adapts to managing the sheer range and volume of new media sources.”
The above passage compounds and deepens the defendants’ “consensus” fraud, and also compounds and deepens the libel to the effect that I and others on the list circulated by the defendants are dishonestly disseminating disinformation, in that the defendants here talk of the allegedly “serious problem” of “information manipulation” of which those they have named are supposedly guilty.
The purported “study” says –
“… contrarians have strategically shifted away from their external narrative – initially based upon challenging fundamental tenets of climate change science (e.g. its anthropogenic origins), thereby positioning themselves as skeptics with legitimate scientific motives for dissent – to instead challenging assessments of climate-change impacts in an effort to impede the development of proactive regulations. However, a separate large-scale analysis of internal documents from 19 contrarian organizations shows that the inward contrarian narrative is still rather focused on climate-change science, with the relative frequency of science-related topics increasing relative to policy-related topics over the period 2009-2013.”
Here, a new libel is introduced. This time, the defendants say that I and others on the list they have circulated are to some extent abandoning scientific opposition to the Party Line and retreating towards challenging the imagined (and, to a striking degree, actually imaginary) adverse impacts of global warming. They then retreat from their own position to some degree. Yet they suggest that I and others on the list are making “an effort to impede the development of proactive regulations”.
The purported “study” describes the 386 “prominent” “expert” “scientists” it has chosen as serving as –
“an objective measurement baseline for juxtaposing visibility in the media with authority in the scientific domain”.
Later, the “study” says –
“These prominent scientists, many are pre-eminent climate change experts with distinguished careers spanning several decades, serve as a size-balanced comparison group.”
Here, the defendants repeat and reinforce their libel to the effect that I and others on the list they have so widely circulated are mere “contrarians”, while their own “objective” list are “experts”. Yet the defendants know full well that many of those on the list they have circulated have considerable expertise that is the equal of that possessed by those on their favoured list of “scientific experts”.
The purported “study” says that the –
“disproportionate media visibility of contrarian arguments and actors not only misrepresents the distribution of expert-based beliefs, it also manifestly undermines the credible authority of career climate-change-science experts and reinforces the trend of climate-change contrarians presiding over public scientific discourse, which all together hinders prospects for rapid public action on climate change.”
Here the libel that the “contrarians”, such as me and other on the list circulated by the defendants, are inexpert is repeated, and the suggestion is made that we “hinder prospects for rapid public action on climate change”. Yet the defendants know full well that there is no scientific need for such action, and no economic case for it. They are pretending that the Party Line to which they adhere is the only permissible scientific and economic position.
The purported “study” then describes those with whom its authors disagree as represented by the term –
“… ‘climate skeptic’, a broad term that collectively refers to contrarians and denialists, and also conventional scientific skeptics who are driven by more legitimate motives for dissent. For this reason, we focus on a select set of contrarians who have publicly and repeatedly demonstrated their adamant counterposition on climate-change issues – as extensively documented by the DeSmog project, a long-standing effort to document climate disinformation efforts associated with numerous contrarian institutions and individual actors.”
Here, the defendants’ malice is again evident. They use the word “denialists”, just as they had used the word “deniers” in the heading and in the opening paragraph of their widely-circulated publicity blurb.
A further evidence of malice is the defendants’ choice of the “deSmog” project as though it were a reliable source of information about “denialists” such as me and others on the list the defendants have circulated so widely. The “deSmog” project was founded and funded by one Lefebvre, a convicted internet-gaming fraudster whom a court, some years ago, ordered to refund some $185 million in ill-gotten gains to the hapless gamblers upon whom he had preyed. It is, on any view, a disreputable and unreliable source, as is evidenced by the hate-filled, venomous tone of its attacks upon those of us who have dared to question the Party Line on climate.
The purported “study” complains that its methods –
“… cannot fully explain how non-scientific experts are able to compete with scientific experts in the attention economy facilitated by the media.”
The above statement is a further evidence of the defendants’ fraud. The defendants know perfectly well that scientific discourse is only discourse if both sides of the argument are permitted to put forward their case. They know perfectly well that journals such as Nature take an extremist political view on questions such as climate and have a policy of refusing either to entertain any papers questioning the Party Line in any fundamental degree or even to entertain pre-submission enquiries – such as the enquiry that I had myself submitted to Nature only a few weeks ago, asking whether the group would be interested in a paper from my team explaining that the predictions of global warming that had proven exaggerated when compared with observation or with expectation or even with one another were exaggerated because climatology had perpetrated a fundamental error of physics. They know, therefore, that those scientists willing to toe the Party Line can get their nonsense published much more easily than those of us who question the Party Line. That fact undermines the defendants’ entire case for the significance of the fact that their chosen “objective” list of “expert” “scientists” have published more papers than their chosen list of “deniers”, “denialists” and “contrarians”. Of course they have published more papers than we: for the journals – the Nature group being an example – will not even look at, let alone review, still less publish, papers that fundamentally question the Party Line to which the defendants adhere.
The purported “study” says –
“… disproportionate visibility – or false balancing – is likely to mislead public perception, suggesting falsely that within the scientific community there is parity in the number of scientists who do and do not agree on the fundamental issues of anthropogenic climate change.”
See how heavily the defendants lean, again and again, on their notion of “consensus”. In fact, the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers stating no position on the question whether recent warming is chiefly anthropogenic exceeds 30-fold the number of peer-reviewed papers stating that recent warming is chiefly anthropogenic. The defendants know this perfectly well. Yet they claim, falsely and fraudulently, that the “consensus” supports the Party Line to which they adhere, when it does not.
The “study” says –
“A common theme in the climate-change communication literature is false balance, representing how the journalists tradition of balancing sources across opposing views gives rise in the case of climate change to an inaccurate representation, one that falsely suggests that there is a balanced debate between equally-sized groups.
From the point of view of a plaintiff such as I, the above passage is further evidence of the defendants’ malice. The defendants are sullenly determined to prevent those who disagree with the Party Line from being allowed any access to the news media. They are wilfully, and fraudulently, attempting to choke off all dissent by deciding and declaring, aprioristically and contrary to what they know to be the truth, that to report anything but the Party Line to which they adhere is to be guilty of “false balance”. In fact, the group of peer-reviewed papers not endorsing the “consensus” position is far, far larger than the group endorsing it. But that mere fact does not stop the defendants from fraudulently demanding – in what purports to be a “peer-reviewed” “research” “study” but is in reality a party political broadcast for the defendants’ extremist, totalitarian viewpoint – that journalists and editors should censor what is, in the journals, the majority view to the effect that we cannot be sure that global warming is chiefly anthropogenic. The fact that that is the majority view, even though journals such as the Nature group have done their malevolent worst only to reflect the defendants’ Party Line in their pages, shows just how little true “consensus” there really is. Indeed, the notion that totalitarians should peddle the idea that there is a consensus, that the debate is over and that the West must be made to suffer for its imagined “climate debt” was first promulgated by a Communist front group in the United Kingdom in 2006. It was rapidly picked up by similar groups worldwide and has been the Party Line ever since.
The purported “study” discusses its “results” thus –
“Climate change is a wicked multidimensional problem, whereby individual dimensions – i.e., environmental, socio-economic, technological, science communication – while separately challenging, together pose the 21st century’s pre-eminent grand challenge. In this regard, a public that is unaware of the realities and risks associated with climate change poses a threat to society and planet by undercutting strenuous global efforts to rapidly mitigate threats to the planet’s biosphere.”
Climate change is actually a simple question, as the defendants well know, but they and many others in academe are fraudulently profiteering by pretending that the question is complex. The question is this: How much warming are we likely to cause? The answer, on the evidence to date, is “about a third of what had originally been predicted”. Given that the exaggerated predictions of global warming are based on a monstrous error of physics, there is no legitimate scientific cause for alarm. Given that most if not all of the warming is attributable to the Sun, and that the tampering with the irradiance record to suggest otherwise can be proven, and that the radiosonde data show none of the radiative imbalance that would suggest a large rather than a minuscule feedback response, the actual human contribution to global warming will not be more than one-third of current midrange estimates, and may be considerably less than that. Therefore, the defendants’ relentless and malevolent – though very profitable – insistence that global warming “poses a threat to society and planet” has no scientific foundation whatsoever, and they know it. Professor Mörner has rightly characterized the Party Line on climate as “the greatest fraud ever perpetrated”.
The purported “study” says –
“Indeed, communicating authoritative information about the risks of inaction is crucial for achieving global action.”
And here is an open admission on the part of the defendants that they are peddling a political Party Line rather than writing a legitimate scientific study. The economic consequences of the defendants’ implicit acceptance of global-warming projections that are now proven excessive are severe. Stern (2006) took 
mid-range estimated warming by 2100 as driving a welfare loss of 
–
of global GDP (cf. 
–
in IPCC (2013). The 
upper bound ibid., assuming a 
pure rate-of-time discount rate that gave “a 
chance of the planet not seeing out this century” (Dietz et al. 2007), drove a 
-of-GDP extinction-level loss. Adding 
per-capita consumption growth without climate change gave a 
mean social discount rate (cf. 
in Garnaut 2008), against a 
minimum market discount rate (Murphy 2008; Nordhaus 2008). Since the probability of extinction is actually nil, submarket discount rates are unjustifiable. Even before allowing for the scientific error identified supra, at the midrange 
discount rate applied over the 21st century, Stern’s ![clip_image006[1]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/clip_image0061.png?quality=75&ssl=1 "clip_image006[1]"){kind=small}
-of-GDP welfare loss would become only 
(or ![clip_image014[1]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/clip_image0141.png?quality=75&ssl=1 "clip_image014[1]"){kind=small}
for no net loss until preindustrial temperature is exceeded by 
), while his ![clip_image018[1]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/clip_image0181.png?quality=75&ssl=1 "clip_image018[1]"){kind=small}
-of-GDP loss would fall to ![clip_image010[1]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/clip_image0101.png?quality=75&ssl=1 "clip_image010[1]"){kind=small}
(
).
The World Bank cites global warming as its reason for refusing in principle to fund coal, oil and gas projects in developing countries, where denying electricity to 1.3 billion people shortens lifespans by 
years. After the corrections proposed here, anthropogenic warming will be small, slow and net-beneficial. Globally, a policy rethink is advisable. There is certainly no case whatsoever for the “global action” that the defendants profiteer by advocating.
The purported “study” describes those who disagree with it as follows –
“In particular, by contrarians we refer to individuals frequently sources by institutions denying the documented realities of climate change and its consequences and/or individuals who have personally expressed inaccurate statements.”
See how the defendants cannot conceal their malice. Yet again the word “denying” appears. Now they say that those who disagree with the Party Line to which they adhere, including me and others named in the list they have so widely circulated, are “denying the documented realities of climate change and its consequences”, when the defendants know full well that it is they who are denying the realities that global warming has been far slower than had been predicted, and that even if it were to occur at anything like the originally-predicted or currently-predicted rate any attempts to mitigate it would constitute a crippling, global net welfare loss.
The purported “study” concludes thus –
“Research shows that journalists often quote contrarians either to infuse objectivity or to dismiss their position outright. Yet these approaches also detract attention from the relevant climate-change narrative and provide the counterproductive impression that there is something substantial in contrarian arguments to be debated. Thus, the time has arrived for professional journalists and editors to ameliorate the disproportionate attention given to climate-change contrarians by focusing instead on career experts and relevant calls to action.”
Here, the defendants recite yet again what that Communist front group proclaimed as the Party Line well over a decade ago: the science is settled (when the defendants know it is not); the consensus is near-unanimous (when the defendants know that it is limited only to the question what fraction of global warming is anthropogenic, and that on that question the defendants are in a tiny, insignificant majority that they are fraudulently presenting as though it were an “overwhelming” majority); and we must act (when in fact we must not act, for if we act we cause needless economic and environmental damage).
With good reason, then, I reiterate the requests set forth at the beginning of this letter. I shall expect answers from each defendant within seven days of the date of this letter.
Yours faithfully,
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Well done Christopher. Unfortunately it will take the courts to help expose the fraudulent deceptions being used by the warmists. Please keep it up at every turn.
Why should only self-appointed do-gooders sue? Well done, Lord Monckton.
Much easier to bring this libel suit in UK than in US. If you set up a go fund me for the suit, I am in.
Yes, unfortunately a media site or publication, is not obligated to tell the truth, according to the Supreme Court. The 1st amendment allows them to say anything they want, including lying about their lying.
The SCOTUS and 1st Amendment do not carry any weight in the UK.
That was my point. Here in the US he wouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But since he is in England the rules are different. I wish him success.
Then I suppose the question becomes “Can a person who publishes something in one country, where the work being published may be deemed protected speech, be sued for that work having been published, by someone in another country where the laws, or the interpretations thereof, are different and the work is not protected speech?
Then I suppose one would need to know if this work has been actively promoted and disseminated in that other place, by the original publisher?
I do not know the answers to these questions, but I am interested in finding out.
Does the UK have court system have provisions for Class Action lawsuits?
If so, it would be worthwhile to have all the listed “contrarians” designated as a Class.
After the 2015 merger, Springer Nature has a substantial UK presence, though it’s 53% owned by German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Dunno how Brexit might affect a British legal action.
The ECHR is not an EU legal instrument, it was in place before the U.K. joined the EEC. It was created soon after WW2 to prevent another Nazi regime. Therefore the U.K. will still be subject to its provisions. It is comparable with the Bill of Rights in the US constitution.
The ECHR will not deal with any cases until the matter has been dealt with in one of the affiliated nations and all petitions in that nation have been exhausted.
… and, more importantly, the Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the Convention into UK law.
Wrong, the Human Rights Act of 1998 had no significance in relation to whether a citizen of the United Kingdom can appeal to the ECHR, this right is incorporated into Art. 34 and applied from the time the United Kingdom ratified the Convention. In Norway we had the same legislative addition in 1999, the law primarily regulates the relationship between the text and the content of the European Convention on Human Rights and the laws passed by the Norwegian parliament.
Lawyer Varaker is out of his depth when considering UK law. Though the Convention gaves citizens of States parties the right to approach it, the Human rights Act 1998 incorporated the Convention into UK law, requiring the Courts to take account of all its terms explicitly when considering cases that might in due course be referred to the Court. Otherwise, there would have been no need for Parliament to pass the 1998 Act at all.
And You have not yet understood that a case in ECHR is not between the original parties, but a case between the complaining party and the complained nation. A number of European nations needed clarification of the relationship between national law and the rules of the European Convention on Human Rights, in part because the ECHR began to become the supreme appeal body for cases that were initially not intended for this Court’s jurisdiction. The Human Rights Act of 1998 in the United Kingdom or Menneskerettsloven of 1999 in Norway had no influence whatsoever on the interpretation of the various articles in the ECHR. So please stop spreading this nonsense, both the English and Norwegian parliament had to draft these laws to make clear what influence ECHR should have on internal law. It had and has no consequences for the legal status of those who appeal to ECHR. I have actually worked on such matters and find it startling how ignorant You are, and at the same time pronounce you with the greatest sufficiency.
The contemptible shyster and concern troll Valaker, having been outed, now lives down to the unenviable reputation he already enjoys among Norwegian skeptics. He clearly has no knowledge whatsoever of the relationship between UK and EU law. His ignorance, considering that he is supposed to be a lawyer, is stupefying. I recommend that no one thinking of going to law in Norway should go anywhere near him. And he continues to avoid the main point of the head posting, which is that the climate fraudsters whom he actively supports, despite his failed and mendacious pretence to the contrary, have dangerously exposed themselves both to civil suit and to criminal prosecution. His feeble and futile attempts to distract attention from that main point have failed.
Well Mr. Monckton, now you revealed to everyone how ignorant you are of the questions you pronounce so obliquely. You claim that I “have no knowledge whatsoever of the relationship between UK and EU law,” well I actually do, but that has nothing to do with the question before us. As John Collis states above, the ECHR is not an EU body, and has never been, so the relationship between UK and EU law has only relevance in your ignorant mind .
Are the Russian Federation and Turkey members of the EU? The last time I checked they were not, but they are both members of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights.
And when it comes to the main point, I have clearly stated above what my opinion about the Nature article is. But now we are discussing jurisdiction, so do not make it even more difficult for yourself by entering something completely different. Or is the diversion just an excuse to continue to portray me negatively?
The vexatious concern troll Rune Valaker claims to understand the relationship between UK and EU law, but then makes the elementary shyster’s mistake of assuming that EU law has nothing to do with the European Convention on Human Rights. On this, as on everything else, Advokat Valaker is not only intemperate in the manner of his expression, which is why he was redacted at the Klimarealistene (Norwegian climate realists’) website, but also entirely wrong in law.
By a series of measures, notably including the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU has incorporated various aspects of the European Human Rights Convention into UK law. By Article 17 (if I remember aright) of the Regulation, every citizen of the EU has what is often called “the right to be forgotten”. Where, as here, the name of an EU citizen is taken in vain by a libellous publication, the victim has the right to demand that, under the right to be forgotten (a concept which, incidentally, has also been adopted in Argentina), all references to him or her be permanently deleted from the data concerned.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation was incorporated into UK law by the Data Protection Act 2018.
It would be better if Advokat Valaker were to confine his advice to matters other than the law, about which he is strikingly and belligerently ignorant.
I’m afraid Monckton is among the biggest climate hypocrites the world has ever seen. On one hand he defends scientific pluralism, condemning Mann’s lawsuit against Steyn / National Review and Mann’s lawsuit against Ball. On the other hand, he prefers to sue those who oppose him, and does so to an extreme degree. That is, he never sues, he just threatens to sue. Every time he feels contradicted, he sends out a so-called warning shot, a legal practice that is sent out before the lawsuit is filed. He even threatened to report me to the company I am affiliated with and to the norwegian BAR.
But Monctom just have just a big mouth with no ability to perform.
With all due respect,
Apples vs. Oranges is so “cliche,” I shall use a different comparison….Apples vs. PEANUTS….and emphasize the choice with two poems:
An apple sat on a railroad track, feeling blue and cross.
Around the bend came “Number 10,”….TOOT! TOOT!…applesauce.
A peanut sat on a railroad track, his heart was all “a-flutter.”
Around the bend came “Number 10,”….TOOT! TOOT!…peanut butter.
Can we dispense with the senseless and juvenile ad homs and get on with the task or defending our HONOR, please? Circular firing squads are so unnecessary and inefficient and counter-productive and waste ammunition.
I dont think you understood why Lord monckton is taking action,or your deliberately obfuscating his point,he accused you of being a troll ,he was wrong you are a troll, with nothing constructive to add to the debate.
all aboard?
I wish you luck Monckton and hope that you succeed,
We have the same exaggeration because of the supposed threat of global warming here in New Zealand .
Our national news papers openly push global warming and the two TV news are straight out propaganda exercises.
The leader of the opposition made a remark that the sea level threat was a very low danger .
The next day a cartoon showed him on the top of the Beehive our parliament 65 meters above the sea level with water up to his waist waving a flag ,with the caption” Nothing to worry about”
I know that it was only a cartoon but at the sea level rise that is documented by reputable scientists here is 1,5 mm per year and showing no acceleration.15 centimeters in 100 years , less than 6 inches and at that rate it would take 43000 years to reach 65 meters.
One of our scientist was born in Holland and he said that the Dutch have been building dykes to hold the sea back for centuries and adding 6 inches a century is not really a problem
A few days later the cartoon featured the world in a frying pan .
The two warmist gurus here are James Renwick and Jim Salinger and they are quoted and appear on news programs regularly.
Skeptical comments are non existent and the skeptical view point gets little publicity and the major news outlets censor and refuse to publish factual letters and articles as they have editorial councils that rule what is allowed.
I knew who it was when I read the word “rebarbative”. Not many people can similarly conjure up words from the English language that I haven’t head before.
That word just isn’t very attractive.
LOL
Joz Jonlin
Like someone returning to the Barbary Coast for a vacation.
Yes, nice to see an Englishman fully exercise his language. I fear we here in the Colonies only posses the abridged version of his lordship’s dictionary…
I rarely have to look up a word, but had to in the case of “Mesdames”.
I thought it a typo at first reading.
I too was able to surmise the author before reading it to the end, although I had to skip ahead to be certain.
I was also thinking before getting halfway through that it is a remarkably detailed rebuttal and criticism of the original article to have been posted so soon afterwards.
Another of the biggest differences between climate skeptics and climate alarmists is command of the facts, and being able to immediately call to mind responses to any of the malarkey spewed by those in the alarmist camp.
It’s a terrible paper and obviously written to garner attention. The problem arises that it’s already out in the wild and anything meant to stop the dissemination of this thing only makes it more visible, no matter how terrible it is. The Streisand Effect will kick in and everyone will want to see this garbage. On the other hand, sunlight should kill this propaganda hit piece. Unfortunately, there are too many in the media who will run with this and report on it as if it were a serious study.
“It’s a terrible paper and obviously written to garner attention. The problem arises that it’s already out in the wild and anything meant to stop the dissemination of this thing only makes it more visible, no matter how terrible it is. The Streisand Effect will kick in and everyone will want to see this garbage.”
That’s true, but this study was so badly done that it ought to be obvious to just about any reasonable person once the details are explained. I would say this is a *huge* hit to Nature Communications and strikes at the credibility of all similar publications. They are all going to be on defense because of this slander study approved by Nature Communications.
So this is what “science” has become…settle it in court ’cause the “scientists” aren’t listening. So very sad, but I hope a judge will hear it. Logic has certainly failed.
Robert of Texas
It’s not a case of science though.
This is simply a case of slander/misrepresentation etc. The science merely demonstrates how wrong and vindictive these people are.
I knew that the writer was Monckton, before I even looked at the bottom of the article. He has a distinctive, almost unmistakable style or writing. I’d call it “flowery dignified” — perhaps a bit too much so to be taken seriously, I’m afraid.
I’d like to see a re-write.
Robert Kernodle
I can promise you, from personal experience (lots of it) that to stand up in court and deliver something that does not represent you, or is edited by someone else, is a slippery slope to losing a court case very quickly.
Any court is obliged to take anything presented to it seriously until it can be demonstrated otherwise.
Mr Kernodle, as so often, misses the main point, which is that Nature Communications behaved outrageously and anti-scientifically. So often the concern trolls here try to divert the discussion on to inconsequentialities.
My dear sir, Grateful for the succinct and carefully responsive summary of their clumsy assertions and castigations, I do think you’ll want it to read: a tiny, insignificant MINORity that they are fraudulently presenting as though it were an “overwhelming” majority — in your second to last paragraph.
This is awesome.
I have long said that skeptical climate scientists are among the least litigious people in modern America. We need more pushback like this to the casual smears that have become climate alarmists big stick.
VMoB,
There is a place for using the law against those that use offensive and demeaning labels to silence critics and debate. BUT for that to work you need to frame your legal complaint properly and carefully.
I am both an experienced solicitor and also what some would call a denier.
We should meet up some time and talk about how the law can be used to clean up this whole debate. It is easy to find me.
Well done, Monckton. I will happily donate to support this, as I did for Dr Ridd’s case here in Aus.
DeSmogBlog, the ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’ of Climate Change…
Yes, except it has even bigger $$ behind it.
http://leftexposed.org/2016/08/desmogblog/
Class action bait.
So many interesting figures in the infamous NATURE Communications [Confabulations] article. So many contrived words to justify figures that are visual art, NOT science.
The abstract alone is a joke:
The use of the word “denier” is clearly defamatory and I’ve no doubt that a judge will agree with the Lord Monckton unless they can somehow find something that sceptics “deny”.
However, because the word was used in the phrase “Climate deniers”, the test will be a lot harder than just denying something. Instead, the strict interpretation is that we supposedly deny “climate”. That could be taken as in “deny Jesus” making climate a form of deity. Or perhaps we are supposed to deny the existence of “climate”, which I can’t imagine how they’d argue. They could argue it was short for “climate change” denial, but as sceptics accept the climate changes, this again would lead nowhere.
The only even faintly possible way to argue this phrase had any validity I can see is to try to attempt to argue it means “present climate change” … which given that I don’t think a single sceptic would “deny” the climate has changed since the high temperatures of the 2016 El Nino, looks a lost cause to me.
Another “Twitter” argument would be that “Climate denial” doesn’t mean what it actually says but is just a group name. But I don’t think judges have much sympathy with people who just use a libellous term without thinking.
Another way that those writing these ad hominem papers have had out of it was that they slandered as a group … but they’ve been stupid enough to list individuals.
There is some protection for peer reviewed research, so the crux may be the requirement that there is “malice”. To quote: “Malice in the case of qualified privilege means a dominant improper motive for publishing a statement, whereas in the case of fair comment, it has the narrower meaning of absence of an honest belief in the truth of a statement or reckless indifference as to the truth.”
But they said this: “we developed methods to hold people and media outlets accountable for their roles in the climate-change-denialism movement, which has given rise to climate change misinformation at scale.” … The phrase “to hold people accountable”, implies that they intentionally attacked individuals for their “roles” (what role?) in some: “climate-change-denialism movement”. A movement implies that the association of individual has some structure, which in turn implies that there is some kind of unity of view which it would be reasonable for any researcher to have investigated before making derogatory statements intended to “hold them to account”. It is therefore impossible to excuse this with a “we can’t know what every sceptic thinks” … because they’re the ones that have said there is a unity of purpose via the words “movement”.
Also “holding them to account” shows a clear motive, not of academic reporting or investigation, but of political activism which is hardly consistent with an academic study and may render the “peer review” defence invalid. And even if valid, unless the defendant could support their numerous false assertions, then the motive of “holding to account” would be improper .
Interestingly, I’m not convinced that peer review gives them much protection, but quite the opposite. Because, if this had been a simple opinion article, then I would suggest a test of reasonableness would be “on the balance of probability”. But by asserting it is a peer reviewed article, then it would seem the threshold for reasonableness is that much higher, because a falsehood in a peer reviewed work is much more defamatory than one in a puff piece article. It is also all the more clear, in a reviewed article, that the libel was intentional rather than a unfortunate mischoice of words.
For me the phrase “holding them to account” appears to be most unfortunate as it implies an intention to punish, an intention, not to impartially investigate and report as would be suitable for a peer review study, but instead a motive to intentionally injure the reputation of all the individuals listed.
” … which given that I don’t think a single sceptic would “deny” the climate has changed since the high temperatures of the 2016 El Nino, looks a lost cause to me.”
Please tell where the climate has changed; is that change global? El Nino, PDO, etc are known climate or perhaps weather oscillations not climatic changes; if they were to say disappear perhaps…
I have traveled to almost every place in the US lower 48 and to Hawaii and Alaska for over 30 years multiple times and separated by five to seven years.
I have observed with my own eyes:
Winter is still Winter when it is suppose to Winter
Summer is still Summer when it is suppose to Summer
The places that have beaches still have those beaches in the same place.
Climate Changes; period. full stop but every climate has an enormous weather variably and depending which climate and where it is located that weather variably may extend beyond a human’s life time.
What I deny is the supposedly large input caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. When I see no change.
Range of temperatures on Earth:
~-126F to ~+140F
The supposed average ~+58F ( last time I bother to look anyway) –> does not seem very warm to me.
58°F puts us in the cold tail end of a worrisomely long-in-the-tooth interglacial interval within an ongoing ice age.
Climate comes from the Greek (from memory) Klimat and that means “inclination”.
By inclination they meant the angle of the sun and thus the latitude (no they weren’t flat earthers) in the past.
So, “Climate Change” linguistically is a change in the weather away from what you would expect for that “inclination”. We expect a seasonal cycle, we expect inter-seasonal variations, but any sustained change away from the “norm” should be termed “climate change”, which includes a few years of El Nino, PDO, etc.
Perversely, what we sceptics are really up against is literal climate change denial epitomised by the hockey stick which was created in order to falsely show that there was no climate change until the period when Mann aligned all the signals to create the false rise.
The argument of those like Mann is that climate change does not normally exist (literally climate change denial) and therefore any climate change we have seen (conveniently since we started getting temperature readings) can’t be due to natural climate change as they deny that exists, and therefore it must be man-made.
So, bizarrely, it’s us sceptics who are stronger supporters of climate change, because we accept natural climate change has been happening for 4.5billion years. In contrast, the alarmists are denying climate change occurs naturally and that is how they argue that “because (natural) climate change does not exist, the climate changes we seen (not denied by sceptics) must be man-made”.
Mike Haseler: which has given rise to climate change misinformation at scale.
They also used the word “misinformation”, in a context like you quoted that seemed to imply that the CCC group included outright liars. That among other things got me to thinking about libel.
Not a lawyer, but IMO this “paper” is clearly libelous, open and shut.
Nature and the perps exist in such a bubble that they and the peer reviewers didn’t realize their legal peril.
I’ve been trying to think of ways they could defend this case and except for some exotic legal ploy of which I know nothing, I can only see two.
The first is to argue that “climate change denial” doesn’t mean denial of climate change, but denial of man-made climate change. We can easily prove we don’t deny mankind does change the climate by pointing to the fact that almost all sceptics accept doubling CO2 will cause 1C rise and that humans do change the climate in cities.
So, they would then have to argue “climate change denial” means “Catastrophic man-made climate change denial” … and I think that kind of an argument will not go down well with a judge.
The other kind of argument is that “climate change denial”, means “denial”, in the context of climate change. Here, what is being denied would be the various other allegations in the paper, and so THEY NEED TO PROVE: “misinformation at scale”,which I’m similarly convinced they could not win as an argument before a judge. Indeed, given Monckton previously took Al Gore’s film to court and won spectacularly on most accounts, it is far easier to argue they are guilty of misinformation “at scale”.
“We can easily prove we don’t deny mankind does change the climate by pointing to the fact that almost all sceptics accept doubling CO2 will cause 1C rise”
I’m not sure about that. I, personally, don’t believe a doubling of CO2 will result in a 1C rise in temperature, although I don’t disbelieve it either, because there is no evidence either way. Any figure we name at this stage in our discovery is just a guess. It may be an educated guess, but it is still just a guess, until the actual figure is nailed down and that has not happened.
There is a possibility that CO2 adds *no* net heat to the Earth’s atmosphere after feedbacks are included. Noone can dispute this successfully at the current stage of understanding.
In response to Mr Abbott, it has not yet been demonstrated that the small change in CO2 concentration that we have achieved has a significant effect on global temperature. That is why our own approach concentrates on demonstrating that feedback response is very likely to be negligible and cannot be anything like as substantial as is at present imagined.
However, our results might be verified by a close examination of the 20 million radiosonde records available from all parts of the world since the 1950s. If those records demonstrate no net radiative imbalance in the atmosphere, then that result will provide empirical evidence of the absence of any significant temperature feedback response, and that will constrain equilibrium sensitivity to around 1 K, and that’s before taking into account the influence of solar activity on climate, of which the records appear to have been altered to conceal the extent of solar warming.
The central assertion by the defendants in their “Nature” article is that we Climate Deniers are given excessive and unwarranted “equal time” in the public Climate Debate.
That central tenent is completely unsupported by the facts.
Within the popular (mainstream) press I have yet to see a published climate article or climate related broadcast report or interview where a climate skeptic was quoted or asked for an opinion. If skeptics are mentioned at all, it is for the purpose of slander and defamation of character. Skeptics are always maliciously and slanderously referred to as “Deniers”.
Why did the defendants try to make this case in the article? Why stir up the nest when they have all the guns and all the ammunition in the totally one sided climate non-debate (one sided because skeptics have no widespread public voice)?
“Why did the defendants try to make this case in the article?” Because, Doc, the Left always push too far. In this case it was a couple of newbies in a nowhere college, relying on the CliSci practitioners’ derision of skeptical views. They decided they could further the “cause” by de-platforming “contrarians” in the various media markets.
The “study’s” fundamental mistake was quickly realized by the climate big-shots and the incriminating parts removed (too late). The fundamental mistake was in identifying individuals, slandering them and inviting public refutation and lawsuits. Institutionalized censorship is now out in the open and subject to critical review. The tactics of CliSci suppression of alternative scientific analyses is manifest even to the slowest “journalist.”
Apparently internet blogs are taken by them to be the equivalent of major outlets within the MSM.
And an insulting blurb or smear piece is taken to be as important and valuable to the person being smeared as a glowing front page write-up of one or another heroes of the climate liar movement.
But since they did not even make sure their citation counts were actual citations and not the product of a sloppily worded internet search engine inquiry, their results are in fact multiply meaningless.
Wow! I was hoping for something like this, and I am not disappointed.
Thank you Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
If I recall correctly, the 2nd Lew paper, called “Recursive Fury” had to be retracted because of similar complaints, in that Lewandowsky was diagnosing mental illness in “subjects” that had not consented to be subjects in his experiment in the first place, an ethical violation against them based on sound psychological science testing methods, and then medically made personal diagnoses solely on his own interpretation of their psychological makeup from a few blog comments, another ethical violation from the medical ethics side of the house, since these people had not agreed to be his patients. Good luck in getting this PoS retracted from the “Climate Scientology” lierature, Lord Monckton.
How many times have we heard from those in the warmista camp that there is no “C” in CAGW, at least not any that is attributable to reputable members of the climate scientism community?
It was not until reading through this comment thread just now, that I realized that this article in such a publication as Nature Communication (and let’s be real, they only have the credibility because of the Nature part of their name) has broken right through all boundaries of legitimate scientific inquiry and lands squarely in the realm of doomsday alarmism.
And besides for that, the clarity with which Christopher Monckton has described the positions taken by the authors, and also described exactly what is wrong about those positions, we can see that these people have taken it upon themselves to not merely imply, but to state outright that people with a certain point of view and who operate under the mantle of “scientists” constitute a de facto authority, and are somehow entitled and empowered to control not just the content of public discourse, but who shall be allowed to engage in public discourse. And of course it is them and their ilk who shall have this authority and power, and furthermore that categorically none shall be accorded to any who disagree with what they believe.
This is truly an astounding declaration on their part, made all the more egregious by the fact that the subject matter and the methodology they employ have not the slightest resemblance to anything like actual science, though this last may be in itself unsurprising, since it appears (and I may be wrong)that the authors have nary a degree in any hard science between the lot of them.
In spite of such a lack of pertinent credentials, they represent themselves as climate science researchers.
And that lays bare and gives the lie to another of the non sequitur talking points of climate alarmists: That many skeptics are unqualified to opine on matters related to “the science”.
What science actually is, is a proscribed method for elucidating objective reality. It is not anything that is churned out by people with a certain degree program under their belt.
Arguably, it is rather any investigation or explication which is done that employs the proper methodology, no matter who is doing it, or what their academic bona fides may or may not be.
Conversely, any such investigation or explication that fails to employ the methods of scientific inquiry is categorically NOT science, no matter who does the work, for what reason they do so,
and no matter which publication disseminates it.
If Nature Communication publishes garbage, then they are an unreliable and disreputable publication.
Reputation and credibility are far more easily squandered than they are earned.
Excellent post, Nicholas.
“Climate communications” is propaganda. Academic departments of Climate Communications are nothing more than government propaganda organs. Defund them.
Bravo! The gauntlet is thrown! I wait with bated breath for news of the next episode!
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has fired an excellent opening salvo in this battle, aimed at protecting the reputation of some hundreds of scientists and others maligned by this massive slander. However IMHO the fraud charges that he raises are the far more important, and are hardly likely to be seen by a court to be mitigated by a mere apology, however fulsome, from the perpetrators. Let us hope that prosecutors in many jurisdictions are seriously considering long overdue fraud charges against this crew. There should be plenty of slandered scientists ready to act as expert witnesses for the prosecution!
Dude hire a lawyer, FFS.
Steven Mosher
Something else you’re an expert in.
yep. review legal docs weekly since 1995.
Hey look, he followed my advice and hired a lawyer.
DOH!
I know nothing
Mosh – I bet you’re hilarious when playing Cluedo.
Me: “I accuse Ms Pinkton of attacking Lord Monkton in the Naturium with the hockeystick”;
Mosh “Dude hire a lawyer, FFS”.
Mr Sherrington should know that the word “defendant” applies both in civil and in criminal proceedings. the use of the word in pre-action protocols is not without precedent.
Crikey Christopher, you are optimistic expecting them to read and absorb your demands within 7 days, let alone reply and act.
A beautifully written piece that will no doubt send shivers down the spines (do they actually have spines) of the climate fraudsters.
Keep up the good work. The truth will out, as it always does.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley : I am sure you would be aware that Willis Eschenbach has taken a copy of the Supplementary Information which Nature has now deleted, but just in case .. there is a link to it in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/15/visibility-and-invisibility/
I wish you well in this endeavour. After what happened in the Bjelke Petersen trial, I am sure you would be aware that a jury would be very likely to contain enough people who have swallowed the propaganda to ensure that your prosecution would fail if heard in a jury trial. At least with a judge-only trial there is a chance of fairness.
I would be interested to know which solar physicist said that the alterations had been made so as to prevent “deniers” from pointing out that much, if not all, of the global warming of recent decades was attributable to solar activity. I wonder whether the statement really did indicate intent as you imply, or whether it was only referring to the effect of the alterations. So far I have had no reason to doubt that the alterations came from a genuine scientific endeavour.
In response to Mr Jonas, the question for the jury will be whether the defendants have committed fraud and libel. For instance, the defendants talk of “overwhelming consensus”, when in fact the overwhelming consensus in the reviewed journals is to the effect that we don’t know how much warming we’ve caused. We can demonstrate to the jury that the supposed “97% consensus” was fraudulently obtained: we can show that the true figure is 0.3%. That, in my experience, shakes even the most self-confident true-believer.
Indeed, even the unspeakable John Cook, who muscled his way into the Heartland climate conference a couple of weeks back and purported to “interview” me for the Weather Channel, went red in the face with shame when I told him that a senior citizen of Queensland who had complained to the police about Cook’s bogus “97%” claim had been told by the police that a deception had indeed been perpetrated. The best he could do, when confronted with the evidence that he had turned 0.3% into 97.1%, was to mumble something about how the scientists who had written the 11,944 papers he had claimed to review had been separately interviewed and 97% of them had agreed that recent warming had been chiefly anthropogenic. But those opinions, of course, were not peer-reviewed. They were valueless, scientifically speaking, by the very same yardstick that the climate Communists use in their attempts to shut us up. No jury, on seeing Cook’s list of all 11,944 papers, and on realizing that he had marked only 64 of them as explicitly endorsing the “consensus” proposition, would have any hesitation before coming to the view that reporting 64/11.944 as 97.1% was, to say the least, inaccurate and calculated to mislead.
As to the tampering with the solar irradiance data, those data are now being urgently reinspected by competent physicists, in the light of an incautious suggestion by one of the climate-Communist solar physicists that the irradiance data for 1925-1995, which had originally showed a solar grand maximum (see e.g. Hathaway & Wilson 2004), had been altered so as to prevent skeptics from attributing recent warming to the Sun.
It is noticeable that the rate of warming slowed considerably from about 1997 onward (save only for the recent el Nino). As best I can make it out – and I am no expert in solar irradiance – temperature change on Earth in response to variability in irradiance goes as the 60-year integral of solar activity. I am traveling overseas next week to hold discussions with the scientists engaged in this work, and to learn more from them.
Even if solar irradiance did not reach a grand maximum from 1925-1995, the warming we have seen to date, which is about a third of what was predicted by IPCC in 1990, is well within the natural variability of the climate. No other explanation, strictly speaking, is necessary.
However, it has also recently come to light, from the same talented group, one of whose members is also a member of my research team, that the radiosonde data show no radiative imbalance at all in the boundary layer, the troposphere or the tropopause and lower to mid stratosphere (the balloons go pop above that). No radiative imbalance implies two things: first, no feedback response, providing a most powerful empirical confirmation of our own theoretical result; and secondly, no greenhouse effect.
The reason why there is no greenhouse effect is fascinating. Albert Einstein, in a 1919 paper, demonstrated that a molecule of a gas in thermodynamic equilibrium absorbs and at once emits any radiation it receives. This result is usually attributed to Kirchhoff. Apparently, it is only in an environment of thermodynamic disequilibrium that a greenhouse effect can occur: and the radiosonde records show, with a brilliant clarity once they are properly analyzed, that no thermodynamic disequilibrium exists anywhere in the atmosphere, as far up as the balloons can measure (which means 99% of it). No thermodynamic disequilibrium, no greenhouse effect, says Einstein,, and he is usually right.
Naturally, I have a great many questions to ask, not the least of which is whether I may be permitted to give an outline here of the method and results that this dazzling research team have produced. The combination of our theoretical result and the empirical confirmation of it will, in a rational world, be sufficient to bring the whole global-warming house of cards down. I shall keep everyone posted.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley : I have no doubt that scientific arguments such as yours will prevail in the end. That’s the way that science has always worked, though at times it can take a frustratingly long time.
My reference to juries and to the Bjelke-Petersen case, however, lies outside that aspect of science. What happened in the Bjelke-Petersen case in Queensland was that one juror, who was a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of Bjelke-Petersen, refused to find him guilty even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. At that time under Queensland law, a jury’s verdict had to be unanimous (the law has since been changed). The jury spent several days trying to reach a verdict, but the one juror held out and in the end Bjelke-Petersen was acquitted.
If you do choose to prosecute Nature and if the case is heard by judge and jury, then it would only take 3 jurors to be as committed to a particular brand of virtue-signalling as was the Queensland juror for you to lose (assuming that 10 of 12 jurors is sufficient for a verdict). In the current warped political situation regarding climate, I don’t fancy your chances.
Please note carefully that this in no way suggests anything other than that your scientific case is overwhelming. It says only that it can be defeated by the interaction of politics and jurors. I sincerely believe that a judge-only trial would be very much more likely to be better for you. I note that the recent impressive court win by Peter Ridd in a freedom-of-speech trial involving Great Barrier Reef science was in a judge-only trial. Had a jury been involved, I think the result could have been very different – in spite of the obviously overwhelming evidence behind the freedom-of-speech argument. There are many who argue that “climate sceptics” should not have freedom of speech and who would have been only too keen to find against Peter Ridd regardless of any actual evidence had they been in a jury hearing the case. The same applies to your case, if and when it goes to court.
I wish you every success anyway.
In response to Mr Jonas, of course going to law has become something rather like a game of bingo, with far worse odds. It is a casino where the lawyers are the house and the judges are the roulette wheel. But I am well familiar with finding ways of obtaining justice, where justice needs to be obtained, and the courts are remarkably good at finding ways of ensuring that those who have a genunine need for justice and a fair case will be fairly heard and fairly dealt with, procedural obstacles of every kind notwithstanding.
Our rebuttal of our attackers is already being waged on many fronts, and they don’t know from which direction we shall come next. They are already reeling and showing signs of retreat. We don’t expect them to roll over, though in justice that is what they should do. Instead, we shall have to fight them, so that the world – despite the Marxstream media – comes to realize how very, very close we have come to losing the freedom of academic research and debate. Many here are all too willing to allow the world to pass into a new Dark Age in which narrow-minded totalitarians allow only one officially-endorsed opinion on every subject. I, for one, am determined not to go into the night without raging – raging – against the dying of the light.
I agree entirely Lord Monckton, leftist authoritarian agendas,are taking over every aspect of life,sold on the back of AGW, I’m no scientist but have argued against AGW for years ,I have been ridiculed called a liar and banned from voicing my opinion on MSM comment threads, I have been told “if your not a scientist you have no right to comment” the global warmests are fanatics infiltrating every blog every MSM ,the same user name/names every day all day,telling people who have a different opinion there wrong. These fanatics are organized, they come in various guises,as we see on this thread, there frightened of you Lord Monckton and your fellow colleagues, they have infiltrated MSM journalism under the guise of environmental correspondents, yet the only reporting they do is copy and paste what NOAA and NASA have writen amongst others, we only have to look at the BBC’S announcement that the climate debate is settled no opposing opinion/science will be published,what a truly disgusting world we are now living in.
Dear Christopher,
In light of your above comments. your team might wish to consider two specific works as follows:
i) A mechanism whereby solar variability could affect surface temperatures:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/is-the-sun-driving-ozone-and-changing-the-climate/
ii) A mechanism whereby a surface temperature enhancement can occur without GHGs:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/27/return-to-earth/
Stephen I’d like, if I may, to comment on your i) the JoNova article ‘Is the Sun driving ozone …’
“Shorter wavelengths (UV) generate ozone in the stratosphere and penetrate the ocean. Longer wavelengths don’t. But the Sun is also sending out charged particles and driving a massive fluctuating magnetic field, both of which affect Earth’s atmosphere.”
“Shorter wavelengths (UV) … penetrate the ocean. Longer wavelengths don’t.”
While I’m in overall agreement with the thrust of the entire quote above I think there is more. Surely the second bit I’ve highlighted isn’t quite right. I’d like to suggest that although the spectrum shift from solar maximum to minimum isn’t that large it’s significant because it’s likely to have a disproportionally large effect around the point where the atmosphere is/isn’t opaque at some UV wavelengths and that this is likely to manifest itself in the atmosphere/oceans.
During a solar minimum the energy that then isn’t heating the upper atmosphere and creating ozone will instead be acting on clouds/oceans. I’ve put the two together because clouds of course contain tons of liquid water and because it’s often in the form of lots of tiny droplets, will punch above its weight. So, during a solar minimum I would expect to see some additional heating in clouds (where there are clouds) and some additional heating in the oceans where there aren’t clouds. (I’m thinking of a fine mist of water droplets behaving like a gas having the same optical properties as liquid water which differ somewhat from water vapour.)
More generally, I’d also like to suggest that it might be helpful if, in the same way that we talk of a Mediterranean climate or an oceanic climate, we also spoke of a ‘solar maximum climate’ and a ‘solar minimum’ climate.
I believe this would go some way to demystify the changes in the type of weather we see during a solar minimum cw a solar maximum which would in turn take the wind out of the sails of the climate catastrophists.
Finally, something that wouldn’t be generally obvious to the man in the street. When meridional flow is active cold polar air will at times be transported to much nearer the equator where it can pick up more heat than usual. Also, warm tropical air will at times be transported to much nearer the poles where it will lose much more heat to space than usual. This provides a mechanism for reducing the global temperature during Solar Minimums.
So, when the media shouts about the “hottest day ever” during a Solar Minimum summer in UK to give the impression that we are ‘living in a warming world’ they are actually drawing attention to a mechanism that is, paradoxically, probably cooling the Earth!
Mike Jonas,
I did not know of these lists until my son phoned me to tell me about them this evening. Hence, I was not able to check the list of “Contrarians” prior to its redaction, and I am grateful that you have provided information which has enabled me to read them. Thank you.
I am very proud that I have been included in the list of ‘contrarians’, and this honour elevates me to comparison with Bob Carter because his name is also on the list.
However, the inclusion of Bob Carter and me makes the list a misleading indication of active ‘contrarians’. My poor health has prevented me from contributing much opposition to ‘climate change alarmism’ for the past five years, and Bob died in January 2016. (So much for peer reviewed “study”.)
Richard
I would be happy to contribute to a crowd funding of any legal costs.