By Pete Papaherakles —
The global warming hoax has just claimed another victim.
A leading climate scientist has been forced to resign from the advisory board of a think tank after one of the world’s top academic journals rejected a paper he and four other experts produced that suggests climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than is admitted by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their bottom line was that more research needs to be done to “reduce the underlying uncertainty” surrounding climate change.
Swedish meteorologist, professor Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading in Britain, and his colleagues from the United States and Sweden submitted the study to Environmental Research Letters, one of the most highly regarded journals, at the end of last year but were told in February that it had been rejected.
Bengtsson’s paper challenged the IPCC’s finding that the global average temperature would rise by up to 8.1° Fahrenheit if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.
A scientist assigned by the journal to assess the study according to peer-review protocol wrote that he strongly advised against publishing the paper because it was “less than helpful.” He added, “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate skeptics media side.”
Bengtsson is the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner of the 2006 IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for groundbreaking work in numerical weather prediction. He is regarded as the most distinguished scientist to question dire predictions voiced by some scientists and the media. For this reason he was singled out for attack.
His joining of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank on April 30, 2014, was followed by his resignation from it on May 14, after being subjected to what he described as incredible pressure from fellow climate scientists. He said that he had been bullied so badly by his former colleagues that he is worried his health and career will suffer.
“I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that [it] has become virtually unbearable to me,” he wrote. “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 had not expected such an enormous worldwide 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. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expected anything similar in such an originally peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.” He added it was “utterly unacceptable” to advise against publishing a paper on the grounds that the findings might be used by climate skeptics to advance their arguments.
“It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views,” he said. “The reality hasn’t been keeping up with the [computer] models. . . . Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show. Therefore, if people are proposing to do major changes to the world’s economic system we must have much more solid information.”
This is not the first time scientific research contradicting the official global warming line—now renamed “climate change”—has been blocked.
The claims are very similar to events at the University of East Anglia in 2009 known as “Climategate.” Scientists there were accused of manipulating data and suppressing critics of global warming predictions in the run-up to the crucial Copenhagen climate change conference. Climate change critics denied the significance of human-caused climate change, arguing that global warming was a scientific conspiracy. The IPCC was found to have misrepresented their research by failing to reflect uncertainties over raw temperature data.
Over the years, critics of climate change have claimed not only that the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated but also that for the most part it is not man-induced. Instead, they argue, it is the result of natural warming and cooling cycles that the Earth goes through as a result of short- and long-term celestial movements. The hysteria of a potentially cataclysmic rise in ocean levels due to man-made global warming, they say, is used to justify the creation of a tyrannical world government ostensibly to save the planet.
Bengtsson’s ordeal, however, may end up being a turning point in the debate over climate change. Surprisingly, the story was reported on the front page of the The Times, a major British newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch and subsequently in other mainstream publications like the online Daily Mail and The Wall Street Journal.
Many people are starting to ask if the climate establishment is really so sure about the science underpinning its doomsday predictions why does it need to adopt such desperate and oppressive methods to shut out dissenting voices?
Bengtsson is receiving more support as people the world over realize that establishment climate science is little more than pseudo-science, propped up by bullying political activists and unsubstantiated by hard science.
Pete Papaherakles is a writer and political cartoonist for AFP and is also AFP’s outreach director. Pete is interested in getting AFP writers and editors on the podium at patriotic events. Call him at 202-544-5977 if you know of an event you think AFP should attend.
