scandals

The University of Queensland has sent an extraordinary letter to a researcher who wrote a paper exposing the bad research in the Cook et al "97% consensus" nonsense paper about climate change.

The researcher is Brandon Shollenberger, whose website is at http://hiizuru.wordpress.com. In their letter UQ not only threaten legal action if Shollenberger publishes research based on the data, they also threaten legal action if he reveals the content of the letter itself to anyone! This is beyond disgraceful. It would be bad enough from a commercial enterprise, but coming from a publicly funded institution whose every output is paid for by the taxpayer, it beggars belief.

UQ, you have received my last ever alumni donation! You have become trash, beneath contempt. I am ashamed to hold degrees awarded by you.

Here is a portion of Brandon's blog post about the UQ intimidation letter:

Despite the fact that a peer-reviewed journal was cancelled for the stated reason that it published work critical of the IPCC claims, two distractions have now surfaced:

1. that the peer review was actually "pal review" - i.e. review by known friends, associates, etc., of the author(s);
2. that this has somehow compromised the entire 'climate sceptic movement'.

So let's deal with (1):

If the publishers discovered all this in 24 hours and gave the editors a chance to defend themselves, and made a decision to cancel the journal, they are superhuman. So I'd love to hear any theory as to what actually went on except for either:

• they knew about the 'pal review' in advance but it didn't matter to them until they learned that the journal was publishing results they didn't like; or
• they cooked up this excuse after the fact.

In 2009 when the ClimateGate scandal broke, we learned that climate "scientists" manipulated the peer review process to prevent publication of research they didn't like. Today we learn that, after publishing papers the went against the consensus, an entire journal has been closed down! You publish what they don't like, you get punished. Never, ever, anyone, ever again suggest that peer review is any kind of authentication for good science.

The full story is on Jo Nova's site. She writes:

Australian Big Coal has had the chutzpah to put up a video boasting of their contribution to the climate scam. At the start of the video they tell us what thirty pieces of silver are worth these days:

Here's how the scam (really) works:

"It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Here in its entirety is Prof. Hal Lewis' public letter of resignation from the American Physical Society, from GWPF:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

Lord Christopher Monckton has come out with a condensed summary of some of the evidence in the ClimateGate papers.

Some highlights:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

Many are wondering why the mainstream media are so slow off the mark reporting the revelations of sleaze and obvious criminality now emerging about the climate scare ringleaders. I can tell you a few reasons. Just think about it. The wealthy capitalists who run the media will be perfectly positioned to become key players in the Carbon Plantfood Reduction Schemes, trading nothing, and making no real difference to global warming (which would be a good thing anyway), but starving the atmosphere of plant food and thereby starving the poor - but the capitalists, who just love a corruptible market, will be perfectly positioned to skim their percentage off the top and become even wealthier than they are. The rest of us, meanwhile, see our fuel and electricity costs go through the roof and watch our standard of living plummet.

From Glenn Beck. Heads up to WUWT.