It seems like our complaints (and complaints from hundreds of others) are having an impact, this was just added to the peer Reviewed article Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians on the Nature Communications website. This was just posted:
16 August 2019 Editorial Note:
This is an update of an editorial note issued on August 15. Readers are alerted that the editors are aware of a number of criticisms related to this work. These criticisms are being considered by the editors. The Supplementary Information for this Article is currently unavailable due to concerns regarding the identification of individuals. We will publish an update once our investigation is complete.
Even normally reserved climate scientist Dr. Richard Betts is calling for this article to be retracted:
I may very well join Monckton in starting a legal battle over this paper, in the case of Dr. Peter Ridd, we raised over a quarter million dollars in a matters of days, and he won that case.
Right now, I’m pissed off. Hopefully Nature Communications will see the light or the authors will before we take that next step.
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It looks like this could turn into an embarrassing over-reach for the Climate Alarmist and Global Warming Faction.
Why doesn’t blink the UC Merced?
In order for UC Merced to blink, they must first open their eyes.
Academics are playing the game in California, where everything is rigged in Sacramento. It started long before AB32 was signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger, the greenhouse gas law that required energy producers to include “renewable” energy at increasing percentages of generation capacity. For example, the California Energy Commission was buying research to support its political agenda. These days it is necessary to genuflect in the climate religion, to at least make statements of support in your publications for the dogma, but hopefully publish good work regardless.
Good work from UC Merced includes watershed and groundwater studies, forest health, predictions of runoff from snowfall. Some of the results may gall the Sierra Club. Politicians still fear them to some extent. Catastrophic fires like the Rim fire in and near Yosemite, and the Camp fire in Paradise, CA are beginning to reveal the fallacy of Sierra Club politics to the general public.
Coastal Californians have been lied to for so long, sacred cows of “hands off the forest” are hard to kill. Thinning does reduce fuel and severity of a wildfire. It also increases biodiversity. Studies show the higher density of trees leads to competition and shortage of groundwater, which leads to less sap production and greater risk of infestation by bark beetles. We now have over 6-fold higher tree density in many national forests than were present in the forest before fire suppression became the general practice. Most forested areas in CA are mapped to very high fire hazard.
Native Americans routinely burned the underbrush of the forests during or near winter to reduce fire hazard and to maintain open areas for diverse plants to grow, and grazing for animals they depended upon. The forests John Muir saw were maintained by man.
Sacramento and others who merely repeat the propaganda love to blame poor forest health on “climate change”, but in fact, it’s forest mismanagement that has caused the problems we see today in the Sierra Nevada.
Compare:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180424160251.htm
https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestFires
and
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rim-fire-restoration-20180718-story.html
Spot on.
Fires are not only desirable but necessary and inevitable.
Putting out small fires guarantees more destructive hot fires that can reach the crowns of the trees will occur eventually. It is only a matter of time.
Building houses with flammable walls and roofs is the second dumb thing that has been allowed to take place.
Few roads that are small and narrow and not cleared on the sides completes the firetrap.
Would be very interesting to see the list of ‘peer reviewers,’ given all the comments, particularly the one you cite from Dr. Betts. ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant’ (and alto likely the driver for warming, chortle, chortle)
Good point, Taylor. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The peer-reviewers who approved this defamatory “name-naming” paper should, themselves, have their names named.
Good comments in reply to Dr. Betts’ excellent tweet on the bird feed.
Just have to love it.
Its is FRAME-WORTHY when the lost-their-marbles Left get called out for breaking their own so-vaunted, so-defended code of ethics.
Chalk one up to WUWT.
GoatGuy ✓
The L-T-M Left have liberated themselves from “outmoded” things like rules and standards and norms. Leftist ethics is an oxymoron.
Any one on the Contrarian list needs to get a good class action lawyer involved and sue the hell out of them for “Reckless Endangerment”. Given the propensity of the rabid alarmists to go after anyone, even physically, who disagrees with them, this “exposure” is a direct endangerment of those individuals.
^this
The number of people who have lost jobs when it’s discovered that they don’t hoe the climate change line is large and growing.
When the lights come on, cockroaches run for cover.
My sincerest hope is MoB succeeds in his legal efforts to discipline these $&#%@ur momisugly smearing skunks.
J Mac
Reminds me of a hotel my wife and I checked into in downtown NYC many years ago. I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and the walls went from brown to yellow in a matter of seconds!
Clyde,
I know what you mean. I’ve stayed in a dive motel or two, when I was young and desperate for sleep after a long drive. I used to run occasional loads of livestock cross country for cash, when I was in college. I was just about asleep in a Pennsylvania motel when I heard an odd, light ‘drumming’ sound. I turned the light on to find a looong centipede going across the wall paper near the bed. I smashed it with my boot and went to sleep…. I’ve been a light sleeper ever since.
I actually stayed at the No Tell Motel in Eugene, OR.
Quit bragging.
OT — in the mid-50s, my parents stayed with me at a cheap motel down south. The room was OK, but when we went outside in the morning, the entire walkway in front of the motel rooms was completely brown with daddy long leg spiders.
That is known as “tropical high diversity”, it comes with the planet.
J Mac,
I too have sometimes stayed in a dive because I was desperate for a place to sleep. The irony is, we had bought a package tour to NYC that included hotel accommodations, tickets to the Broadway play, Cactus Flower, and reservations at the Copa Cabana. The hotel had a very nice looking lobby, but when we got off the elevator on our floor, the ‘decor,’ such as it was, was similar to a low-income housing, minus the graffiti. The whole trip was a disaster. But, I won’t waste space with the details.
In my humble opinion Richard Betts and the many others who have been libelled by this paper should proceed directly to sue those responsible. Publication in this widely read journal must surely constitute libel in many jurisdictions, and their gross claims to cause consequent damage to the reputation of those named. Retraction of the paper after the damage has been done is clearly not sufficient, except that Monckton of Brenchley has taken the gentlemanly approach in this case. Others may not choose to be so sporting.
They’ve taken down the lists of “scientists” (alarmists) and “contrarians,” but not before Ken Rice at ATTP (and probably others) found them:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2019/08/15/a-thin-bench/#comment-160910
Anthony
Like many New Zealanders, I am guilty of too much reliance on profanities as figures of speech, which betrays laziness of expression, and dilutes their effectiveness through over-use.
You are more disciplined. Which is why you so have so successfully ended this post. It is the only time that I have seen you use the phrase “pissed off”.
Well said, Mr Watts
Still, “ticked off” would have been preferred.
Nope. Profanity is like spanking a child as punishment. If it’s very rare, it works. If it used by default, it is brutal, ineffective and destructive.
Anthony nailed it.
“Angry” works.
Are you listening Sean Hannity? Hannity used to worry about the debasement of /society/culture through the normalizations of such curse words. Now he uses it all the time! Sean Hannity has normalized this word. Good work, Sean.
There are a lot more curse words that need normalizing so Sean has his work cut out for him, although Hollywood is working hard in that “undermining society’s values” direction. It is a wonder anyone can even think straight after watching the moral depavity that passes for entertainment on tv and in the movies and rap videos, and every other means of communication today. All they do is attack traditional values and promote greed and violence.
Those who think it is ok to use that word have been “normalized”, and I think our society is a little poorer for it.
I can curse like a sailor, but I don’t normally do it where it would offend others, if I can help it.
For those who don’t think it is a big deal, don’t worry about it. There’s no reason to change your behavior because I’m afraid this particular horse is already out the barn door and has been deemed acceptable, by some.
MIT have come under a similar barrage, with long time funder of MIT, Jerry Katell withdrawing his funding following The May/June issue (of MIT Technology Review) dubbed The Climate Issue, which he calls ‘the most unscientific, ungrounded and embarrassment to MIT I have ever seen.’ It seems that over-reach is beginning to pull the stitching out from the fabric of the IPCC flag everywhere.
Thanks for sharing that story.
I used to subscribe to Technology Review, too, but not any more. 🙂
Ditto.
It was one of many I found myself unable to put up with.
It would be hard for MIT to outdo their climate roulette wheel of 2009, which I initially took to be a joke: http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newsoffice/files/styles/news_article_image_top_slideshow/public/images/2009/200908311113506360_0.jpg?itok=OiSXfou7
It was not a joke. More accurately, it was a joke, but not an intentional one.
“Nullius in Verba”
I thought that the entire point of ‘science’ was to not take people’s word for it and be skeptical of the prognostications of ‘experts’ and to attempt to falsify their hypotheses. As such an article painting individuals who disagree as ‘contrarians’ is anti-science.
As Feynman said:
But nowadays – “argumentum ab auctoritate” (appeal to authority) seems to be de-rigeur
The modern scientific revolution began when Copernicus dared to challenge the consensus that the sun goes around the earth, supported not only by the Bible, but ancient Greek and Roman astronomers.
The argument from authority was deemed a logical fallacy from the time of Galileo until Hansen’s testimony (not that that is the right word) to Congress in 1988.
Argumentum ad hominem is the Climate Disasterists’ #1 defense. Argumentum ab auctoritate is still in the top five.
Actually, the mediaeval schoolmen used the term argumentum ad verecundiam for the logical fallacy of argument from authority. The argument from “expert consensus”, which is the climate extremists’ first line of defense, is thus a conflation of two fallacies: the argumentum ad verecundiam and the argumentum ad populum – the reputation and headcount fallacies.
In other words, argumentum e stoliditatis might fit the conflation best, thus ushering in the formal era of new logical fallacies.
Nature Communications has set the bar high [low?] in this new era, and so they might be a tough act to follow.
Has anybody looked at the background of the editors? If no, then go look now. Either they know better and simply ignore their expertise, or the higher degrees that they supposedly earned represent nothing of their understanding of their respective disciplines, indicating a monumental failure of the modern education system.
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/about
So, the article is a joke, right?
The word, “incompetence”, seems glaring in my thoughts.
Interesting and insightful. One should be mindful of another tradition which seems amalgamated into what is fast becoming a stew : Push Poll.
Nature Communications has taken up the baton of Trofim Lysenko to advocate dictatorial political control over science. Just a change of field and pjoratives and Lysenkoism has morphed into Climate Science. See Nature Review 2009’s classic article on Lysenkoism!
Soyfer VN. The consequences of political dictatorship for Russian science
Nature Reviews Genetics. 2001 Sep;2(9):723.
Great link David L Hagen. Thanks
The latest in very bad taste and worse, horribly design and badly executed imitation of Lysenkoism research is following the 10:10 movie into extreme disrepute.
That is, back into the rock bottom slime from which it came.
The Nature piece rather spoils the claim that 97% of scientists agree …
Kudos to Richard Betts.
Can you imagine 0.0001% of that reason, intelligence, and civility from, say, Michael Mann?
‘Right now, I’m pissed off.’
Not good. Still…
it’s better than being pissed on.
Photios
One follows the other, this case being no exception.
Johnson was right then, but he wasn’t a scientist!
If anyone had any doubt about how worthless “peer-review” is, this paper should remove them. The fact that the editors of NATURE Communications even thought such rubbish was worthy of being reviewed/published demonstrates that the system is irretrievably broken.
Rick C PE
+1
Everyone needs to know about the replication crisis. When replication is attempted, as many as 90% of published research findings are wrong. In a disturbing number of cases, the original researchers can not even reproduce their own results. Peer review is a sick joke.
There is no excuse for publishing work that can not be replicated. It’s not the fault of the scientists per se. They are stuck with the rules of the game as dictated to them by the ‘system’. The rules need to be changed with some urgency.
Everyone also ought to have read the climategate emails, several of which described the plan to hijack the peer review process for the specific purpose of preventing dissenting voices from being heard.
Nowadays people speak as if peer review is or was meant to be a process of verification.
It is not, and never was that.
More like a sort of proof reading.
It has more to do with publishing than it does with the scientific method.
And now it is mostly a process of gatekeeping by highly biased people with a very definite agenda, and being even handed is no part of that agenda.
It really bothers me when a study finds a change in something and then concludes with no direct evidence that “climate change” is the reason.
Too many “population of bug “x” has declined due to higher temps” without investigating whether the population has merely migrated as an adaptation.
Anthony:
On the previous thread, Willis mentioned that he had obtained the list and forwarded it to CTM in preparation for making it available for download. Is that still going to happen, or have events overtaken that plan?
On another thought: Anybody who files suit opens up the discovery process. Now that is worth the price of admission. Ar a minimum, we see who the reviewers were *and* their comments. Rich!
Check the previous thread. I put the SI as a zip file in my public dropbox, and put the link at the end of the head post.
w.
Thanks, Willis.
I do not think simply filing a suit opens up discovery.
I think there must first be some procedural steps by the court to agree to take the case and delineate certain bounds.
omg. Anthony Watts is a steady rock. If something has stirred him, its time to put the tin hat on and put the gum-shield in. Somebody is in for a bad time
Anthony, I assume you have the wherewithal to initiate and coordinate a concerted effort to eradicate the Nature Communication propaganda agenda. It is all-out war and I will support, financially, efforts to stop the de-platforming of scientific critics of CliSci.
It Looks like they are right.
The Skeptic community is beating the Alarmists hands down. Bigly!
I downloaded the two lists, and they are a Great Read.
H/T to Dave Burton.
The Skeptics list is all names we have all come to know from hanging out here at WUWT. The top 100 are real power hitters known to us all, with many familiar names going way down. It is a real “Who’s Who” of the skeptic community. It also has a fair number of conventional warmists, which is the source of all the fuss.
The Alarmists list gets into Who is That? territory after about the first 25(!). That’s it, that’s all they have. The remaining names all the way down to 386 are a big “Huh?”.
I know I can not say too much, but maybe hitting on some highlights is OK.
(No, on second thought: If Anthony gives to OK to talk about the lists, we can have some fun with who made the cut, and who got robbed. Otherwise, discretion is the safe choice.)
Anthony, Mods: Safe to talk about the lists?
TonyL here is another list which has many scientists and engineers who support Clexit (climate exit) http://clexit.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/clexit-members.pdf Marc Marano is vice-president and Dr Nils-Axel Morner is a director. You will find my name there. I do not usually give my name to protect my daughter who is world known in her field and has been honored for discoveries in the medical field. However, it is time for those who understand heat transfer and other engineering sciences to standup to expose the lies of the climate alarmists.
Where is the investigative reporting on the authors? Just this link from the paper was quite enlightening, but their ethics declaration in the paper says this doesn’t really matter. I mean, what has this guy been writing about? Ya think he was on a mission or what…… C’mon man!
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=%22Alexander%20Michael+Petersen%22&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=all&hl=en
If I was on the list, I would Michael Mann him.
The hubris shown by the authors is breathtaking. They believe and act on CliSci contempt of anyone not on the “Team.” They have Jumped the Shark into libel.
Anthony I would willingly contribute to funding legal action if you chose to go that way
I second the motion.
All in favor say ‘Aye’.
(rhetorical)
We have your back, Anthony. Let us know….
J Mac
Aye!
+100($)
Anthony, I’m willing to put my money where your mouth is.
Me too. The perversion of science has to be stopped. Just as I miss Christopher Hitchins for his intellect and oratory when dealing with religious cults so I miss the extraordinary talent of Richard Feynman for dealing with the alarmists.
They make the data base. It would interesting to compare credentials notes witch ones have no bearing on earth sciences. Who would have more graduates of “Basket weaving” disciplines?
michael