CLIMATE MCCARTHYISM: THE SCANDAL GROWS

CLIMATE MCCARTHYISM: THE SCANDAL GROWS

http://cdn.breitbart.com/mediaserver...5/16/mouth.png

by JAMES DELINGPOLE
16 May 2014


by JAMES DELINGPOLE
1 day ago
Professor Lennart Bengtsson - the scientist at the heart of the "Climate McCarthyism" row - has hit back at his critics by accusing them of suppressing one of his studies for political reasons.

The paper, which Prof Bengtsson wrote with four co-authors, suggested that climate is probably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than is admitted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and that more research needs to be done to "reduce the underlying uncertainty". However, when submitted for publication in the leading journal Environmental Research Letters, the paper failed the peer-review process and was rejected.
One of the peer-reviewers reportedly wrote:

‘It is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’

This, Prof Bengtsson told the Times, was "utterly unacceptable" and "an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views."
He added:

‘The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist.’

In truth, to anyone familiar with the Climategate emails there will be nothing surprising or unusual in this incident or this claim. As the emails leaked in 2009 made abundantly clear, the organised suppression of sceptical papers in learned journals by the alarmist establishment has long been rife within the field of climate science.

What's more significant is that this story has made it to the front page of the Times. Like most of the mainstream media, the Times has been remarkably slow to latch onto the corruption, malfeasance, waste, dishonesty, bullying and lies which are rife throughout the climate change industry. If it hadn't been for the internet and sites like Watts Up With That? and blogposts like this one the Climategate scandal would have passed almost without notice.

Finally, it seems, the MSM is beginning to wake up to something it really ought to have picked up on long ago: the greatest and most expensive scientific scandal in history, in which a cabal of lavishly grant-funded, activist-scientists from Britain to Australia, Germany to the US, has exaggerated the evidence for "man-made global warming" and attempted ruthlessly to suppress the work of sceptical scientists who dispute the "consensus."

Professor Bengtsson's McCarthyite purging may one day come to be seen as the climate alarmists' "Bridge Too Far" moment. As Judith Curry, climatologist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has argued, "It has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails."

The reason, quite simply, is that it shows the climate change establishment in such an appalling light. These people have long traded on the public's acceptance that they are the "experts", the guys we can trust. Yet here they are shown behaving not like loftily-minded seekers-after-truth but simple playground bullies. One German physicist is said hysterically to have compared Bengtsson's decision to join the Global Warming Policy Foundation (a politically neutral think tank) to joining the Ku Klux Klan. Another warmist scientist - an American one this time - petulantly refused to be named as co-author on any of Bengtsson's papers, a form of professional assassination.

This does all rather invite the question: if the climate establishment is really so sure of the solidity of the science underpinning its doomsday predictions, how come it needs to adopt such desperate, unethical and unscientific methods to shut out dissenting voices?

The Bengtsson scandal comes at the end of an exceedingly bad week for the cause of climate alarmism. In other news, still further scorn has been poured on the methodology of the Cook et al paper on the "97 per cent consensus."

John Cook is an Australian alarmist who a year ago produced a paper purporting to show that 97 per cent of studies supported the "consensus" on man-made global warming. It was eagerly seized on by the left-wing activists who run President Obama's Twitter account, who gleefully tweeted under the name @barackobama "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" - with a link to the paper.

But the paper, in fact, showed nothing of the kind. Recently a researcher named Brandon Shollenberger gained access to some of the data used in Cook's paper and found the statistical methodology to be fatally flawed. However, when he raised these points with Cook's employer the University of Queensland he received a stiff lawyer's letter forbidding him from contacting Cook or even making any mention that he had been sent the letter.

Given how often the "97 per cent" consensus figure is quoted by politicians and scientists alike to justify the extreme measures being adopted to "combat climate change", you can well understand why the alarmist establishment is so eager to suppress this inconvenient truth.

Their ability to do so for much longer, however, looks increasingly doubtful. The word is out: establishment climate science is little more than pseudo-science, propped up by bullying political activists, but unsupported by real-world data.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/05/16/Climate-McCarthyism-the-scandal-grows

Of course he was BULLIED. These "advocates make their living off of the climate change gravy train of global political grant money.

Even the foreign Climate mongers blame the Kock brothers., it must be the latest "in vogue" for Socialist/Globalists! IMO

CLIMATE SCIENCE DEFECTOR FORCED TO RESIGN BY ALARMIST 'FATWA'

http://cdn.breitbart.com/mediaserver.../bengtsson.jpg

by JAMES DELINGPOLE 14 May 2014 601POST A COMMENT

http://cdn.breitbart.com/mediaserver...delingpole.pngProfessor Lennart Bengtsson - the leading scientist who three weeks ago signalled his defection to the climate sceptic camp by joining the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - has now dramatically been forced to resign from his position.

His views on the weakness of the "consensus" haven't changed. But as he admits in his resignation letter, he has been so badly bullied by his alarmist former colleagues that he is worried his health and career will suffer.

Bengtsson's recruitment by the GWPF (the London-based think tank set up by former Chancellor Lord Lawson) represented a huge coup for the climate realist cause. The Swedish climatologist, meteorologist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner, in 2006, of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction - was by some margin the most distinguished scientist to change sides.

But this, of course, is why he has been singled out for especial vitriol by the climate alarmist establishment - as he describes in his resignation letter.

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen.

It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years. Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.

Responding to the letter, the chairman of the GWPF's academic advisory council, Professor David Henderson, wrote:

Your letter came as a surprise and a shock. I greatly regret your decision, and I know that my regret will be shared by all my colleagues on the Council.

Your resignation is not only a sad event for us in the Foundation: it is also a matter of profound and much wider concern. The reactions that you speak of, and which have forced you to reconsider the decision to join us, reveal a degree of intolerance, and a rejection of the principle of open scientific inquiry, which are truly shocking. They are evidence of a situation which the Global Warming Policy Foundation was created to remedy.

In your recent published interview with Marcel Crok, you said that ‘if I cannot stand my own opinions, life will become completely unbearable’. All of us on the Council will feel deep sympathy with you in an ordeal which you should never have had to endure.

At his blog Climate Audit, in a piece headlined 'The Cleansing of Lennart Bengtsson', Steve McIntyre commented:

This is more shameful conduct by the climate "community". As a general point, it seems to me that, if climate change is as serious a problem as the climate "community" believes, then it will require large measures that need broadly based commitment from all walks of our society. Most "skeptics" are not acolytes of the Koch brothers, but people who have not thus far been convinced that the problem is as serious as represented or that the prescribed policies (wind, solar especially) provide any form of valid insurance against the risk. These are people that the climate "community" should be trying to persuade. Bengtsson’s planned participation in GWPF seemed to me to be the sort of outreach to rational skeptics that ought to be praiseworthy within the climate "community". Instead, the "community" has extended the fatwa. This is precisely the sort of action and attitude that can only engender and reinforce contempt for the "community" in the broader society.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-L...Alarmist-Fatwa