Yes, there has definitely been a chill around climate science in recent weeks. Brrr!!
Patrick J. Michaels, who used to study and write about climate, comments on Climategate:
After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.
This happened to me and to the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.
GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was “in the skeptics camp.” He emailed Michael Mann to say that “if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted.”
Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that “It’s one thing to lose ‘Climate Research.’ We can’t afford to lose GRL.” In this context, “losing” obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.
Soon the suspect editor, Yale’s James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU’s Phil Jones that “the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there.”
It didn’t stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that “If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.” (Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009)
Now, in assessing Climategate, I must begin by making clear that I have no axe to grind. The planet could be warming up, and human activity could be partly responsible. I am all for ecology; I just wish most of the people fronting environmentalism in my zone were not fashionable urbanites who can’t imagine that our ecology, which has existed since the close of the last local Ice Age , may be sturdier than they think.
To say nothing of ambitious politicos looking to gain power that a constitutional monarchy or republic would not normally permit.
Actually, according to the Canadian Museum of Nature, we – at any rate – are still in an Ice Age (Quaternary Period). Well, that maybe explains why we don’t grow bananas here, though we import plenty.
Meanwhile, here’s another of the burgeoning mass of stories on the Climategate scam: Read More ›