Posted on 05/16/2014 11:47:16 AM PDT by Mount Athos
A scientific study which suggests global warming has been exaggerated was rejected by a respected journal because it might fuel climate scepticism, it was claimed last night.
The alarming intervention, which raises fears of ‘McCarthyist’ pressure for environmental scientists to conform, came after a reviewer said the research was ‘less than helpful’ to the climate cause.
Professor Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of five authors of the study, said he suspected that intolerance of dissenting views on climate science was preventing his paper from being published.
If he and his four co-authors are correct, it would mean that carbon dioxide and other pollutants are having a far less severe impact on climate than green activists would have us believe.
The research, if made public, would be a huge challenge to the finding of the UN’s Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.
The five contributing scientists submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters – a highly regarded journal – but were told it had been rejected. A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process reportedly wrote: ‘It is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’
Prof Bengtsson, 79, said it was ‘utterly unacceptable’ to advise against publishing a paper on the political grounds.
He said: ‘It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views. The reality hasn’t been keeping up with the [computer] models.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
History repeats itself - many articles were rejected in the Germany of the thirties as being ‘unhelpful’ to the cause of Hitler.
The columns of warm air surrounding cities affects climate MORE than CO2, but since liberals live in Giant cities they would never want those torn down....
Oh yeah?
Well you’re a racist!
/sarc(????)
I have news for you. It’s not just AGW/climate change with the problem. It’s endemic.
Peer review == pal review.
I was trying to get that point across. Thanks for emphasizing it.
1.) IF we assume that CO2 is the root problem to Global Warming and Climate Change, THEN consider what would happen if atmospheric CO2 were, somehow, to be eliminated:
The process of Photosynthesis, defined chemically as follows:
6CO2 + 6H2O + (n)photons = C6H12O6 + 6CO2
would cease to generate carbohydrates, (C6H12O6), for most plants and the animals that eat the plants and eat the animals that eat the plants.
2.) To the best of my research, there has never been a cause and effect experiment that establishes that a change* in the concentration of CO2 has had a measurable effect on the temperature of the air.
*Note: at atmospheric concentrations of CO2 approximating maximum to minimum living conditions for most plants.
3.) All known published speculations on the effect of CO2 on temperature are based on the false assumption, as proven by # 2 above, that there is a measurable effect of the change in atmospheric concentration of CO2 on the temperature of the atmosphere.
It is Scientists such as Dr. Lennart Bengtsson who are willing to oppose the peer pressure of emotion-based politics, and stand, resolute, for what can be proven by fact-based Science.
Such men inspire other Scientists to continue the never ending search for Truth, regardless of the severity of peer-pressure inquisition at the time.
As we look to our own US Society, now in the watershed battle between the adherents of the original, empirical-based, US Constitution, and the proponents of emotion-based Socialism, let us pause now and then to refresh our courage by remembering the bravery of men such as true Scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson.
Setting aside the fact that this is measured from a volcano, the point I want to make here is that the difference in concentration over these 50-ish years is a mere 100 parts per million (rounded UP).
That's a change in one part per 10,000 - or 1/100th of 1% (.01%).
It's going to take a lot of convincing to prove to me that .01% of anything could impact the climate at all.
This is the mentality breeding on college universities worldwide with the academic left. If it doesn’t fit the narrative or conform with the current groupthink it doesn’t exist.
To the left, you win an argument by destroying the other differing argument or opinion. You criminalize the opposition.
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Consider, most all of those recording sites have seen adjacent, nearby and/or regional development. Therefore, it follows that there would most certainly be an increase in CO2 locally if for no other reason. How do you back that out of the data? You can’t. And, with that the increase in CO2 is still tiny.
the media doesn’t report obama scandals so it looks like there are none. Even though Obama’s is the most corrupt dictatorial presidency in US history.
oops wrong thread
Unsettling science.
That's a very strange turn of phrase indeed. The missing word is "political", as in "the political reality...".
When you consider that computer power/dollar has increased by at least 6 or orders of magnitude, since the whole IPCC thing began, it makes perfect sense. If you look back at the earlier versions of the IPCC reports, you'll be struck with how very crude and incomplete the models were. Even IPCC acknowledges that, in later reports. In part, that was due to the lack of input data -- but, it was also due to the inadequacies of the computer power available at the time. If it takes a modern supercomputer(say) one day to run a particular climate simulation -- it would have taken about 2,700 years to run that same model, on computers available 30 years ago. Hence, the early models were very crude. Too crude to justify the claims made for their predictive power. With a million times more computer power available to run them, modern models can have more variables, more resolution, more data. It should surprise no one that these models produce different results than the older, cruder models. The little graphic below shows how the resolution of climate models has changed over time.
The alarming intervention, which raises fears of ‘McCarthyist’ pressure for environmental scientists to conform, came after a reviewer said the research was ‘less than helpful’ to the climate cause.
I guess it depends on whose peers are doing the reviewing.
Unfortunately, the current bunch in climate science should be reviewing sixth grade political position statements, not scientific papers.
It is not unusual for scientific papers to be rejected following the peer-review process. But if this was the reason given--if the paper was not rejected on the basis of sound science--then this is troubling.
There have been many papers published which went against the scientific consensus of the time. Scientists have published papers describing evidence for new ideas that were so contrary to the accepted science of the time that they were called crackpots by their peers--yet they persisted with their research and kept publishing. In at least two cases that I can think of, the "crackpots" got Nobel prizes for their novel discoveries.
There are other papers, however, published in peer-reviewed journals or not, that are not worth the paper they are printed on. Sometimes, critical information was overlooked, or was only discovered later, that changed the interpretation of the data. Sometimes, the data itself is not very compelling or accurate. Science progresses not in huge leaps, but in fractions of a millimeter.
I can't tell from this article whether we are just seeing sour grapes, or whether this paper was rejected because it was solid but did not fit an agenda.
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