"Climate McCarthyism:" Did You Know Yet Another Major Climate Scandal is in Progress?

Answer: Of course not, if you read the American media.

For background:

My position on global warming is that we are near the saturation point where additional CO2 will add little additional heat trapping capability to the atmosphere. This is both true theoretically and it is also demonstrated by the fact there has been no warming (according to the metric chosen by the IPCC) for about 17 years. There is some increase in ocean heat content (a more important measure of earth's "temperature") but that increase is much slower than forecast by the IPCC. From that, I conclude that global warming is a small problem (not no problem) that can be managed via adaptation. Draconian measures are simply not warranted at this time.

That position is increasingly being adopted by climate scientists around the world (often silently because they know they would lose their jobs or grant money if they expressed it publicly) as the data at this time (I make no forecast for the future) simply does not support the catastrophic global warming hypothesis.

With that background, let's hop across the Atlantic where the scandal is literally front page news today:

To summarize, one of Europe's most prominent climatologists/meteorologists, Lennart Bengtsson, wrote a scientific paper about the lack of recent warming and it was rejected not because it was scientifically wrong but because it would give support to skeptic views of catastrophic global warming!

You'll recall that in Climategate, the participants said they were going to "redefine peer review."

Obviously, they succeeded. If Dr. Bengtsson (for U.S. readers a weather scientist on the level of the late Dr. Ted Fujita) can't get a paper questioning catastrophic global warming published, then no one can. That puts the lie to the (already ridiculous for other reasons) '97% of scientists agree...' claim. The Mail reports:

Professor Bengtsson’s paper challenged 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. It suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September, and recommended that more work be carried out “to reduce the underlying uncertainty”.

The five contributing scientists, from America and Sweden, submitted the paper 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.

A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process wrote that he strongly advised against publishing it because it was “less than helpful”. The unnamed scientist concluded: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate sceptics media side.”

In addition, Dr. Bengtsson resigned from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) due to the extreme personal pressure and criticism he has received, mainly from U.S. scientists. The Times coverage goes on to say,

When did demonising your opponents become so acceptable?

Lennart Bengtsson is about as distinguished as climate scientists get. His decision two weeks ago to join the academic advisory board (on which I also sit, unremunerated) of Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation was greeted with fury by many fellow climate scientists. Now in a McCarthyite move — his analogy — they have bullied him into resigning by refusing to collaborate with him unless he leaves.

The GWPF aims to ensure that the climate-change debate is more balanced. Its members are not “deniers”, yet as Lord Lawson said in a recent speech: “I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification that I, along with other dissenters, of course, have received for my views on global warming and global-warming policies.” 

Professor Bengtsson’s resignation shows that the alleged “consensus” on dangerous global warming involves suppressing dissent by academic bullying. He emphasises that there is no consensus about how fast and how far greenhouse warming will go, let alone what can be done in response.

Evidence of such bullying emerged in the “Climategate” scandal of 2009, where some climate scientists’ emails revealed them to be ready to threaten and blackball colleagues, reporters and editors who expressed sceptical views. I talk frequently to scientists who are unconvinced that climate change is even close to being the world’s most pressing environmental problem, but who will not put their heads above the parapet for fear of what it would do to their careers.

Because the memory is so distasteful, I have never written about the incident at June 2013's American Meteorological Society meeting in Nashville where I presented a scientific paper that questioned whether the data supported catastrophic global warming by comparing the IPCC's forecasts of a decade ago to the then-current atmospheric measurements. The room erupted in fury. Name calling (literally) commenced. My wife, Kathleen, who has been in the audience many times during my scientific career, had to bail out to the restroom, made physically ill by what was being said and the venomous tone. The session had been over for quite a while before she finally emerged. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) and many of the people in that room should be ashamed of themselves. Just yesterday, the AMS was publishing, via Facebook, more climate propaganda (from advocacy group Climate Central) in the form of "artists conceptions" of what a sea-level rise will look like in various cities. This is highly unbecoming to an organization that calls itself a "scientific" society.

As temperatures failed to warm, it couldn't be called global warming anymore. So, it became
climate change, climate weirding and, in the latest focus-group tested phrase, it
is now "climate disruption."

As the scientific case for catastrophic global warming has crumbled, there is much heat and very little light being generated in climate circles these days. Of course, the U.S. media (as Glenn Reynolds puts it in a similar context, "political operatives with bylines") -- like during Climategate -- will not cover this story or, if it does, (like Climategate) it will say "it has nothing to do with the underlying science."

Of course, it has everything to do with the underlying science. While I do not believe global warming is a fraud, per se, climate science is rife with dishonesty and politics. It is long past time for climate 'science' to police itself of this disgusting behavior.