Big Climate Publishes Its 'Enemies' List

Many of us have been expecting this. 

Over the last six months, I've written a number of articles (here and here, for two of them) about how the field of climate studies is no longer primarily about science and is thus not worthy of that moniker.

Now Nature, which claims to be the world's premier scientific journal, has referenced a list of climate enemies, err, "contrarians." My [sarcasm] favorite words [sarc off] in the article are,

A third decisive technological factor is the paradigm of new media and the nearly boundless scalability of content distribution across the internet. Even in the case where individuals have complete control in choosing their sources of information, they are nevertheless susceptible to significant disparities in content production in addition to being susceptible to media coverage that is disproportionate to the authority and number of scientists holding the consensus viewpoint. ...

[I guess they view freedom of speech as a bad thing.]

These results [that skeptics, including those with PhD's in climate, are getting informally published] demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.

Really? Think about the totality of what you have read about climate recently: You aren't sufficiently informed as to what "consensus" climate opinion says?

Later the article says,

To address this literature gap, we focus our analysis on a group of 386 prominent contrarians, denoted both individually and collectively by CCC.

The link to the "group" is not in the article itself. Here is the list. It was compiled by, published on Twitter, and is courtesy of Dr. Ryan Maue. I now understand why Nature didn't directly link to the list: it is hilarious. On the same list as distinguished scientists like Dr. Ross McKitrick, Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., and Dr. Judith Curry are Vice President Mike Pence and Alex Jones (Alex Jones??).

Evidently, Nature cannot tell the difference between politicians and genuine climate scientists. And, to be in its climate clique one must toe the party line and at least profess to believe that global warming is the functional equivalent to a moon-sized asteroid striking the earth (by the way, we foolishly spend far more on global warming than asteroid defense). The fact that the PhD's listed have hundreds of peer-reviewed papers about climate in prestigious journals apparently does not matter to Nature.

This is not how a legitimate science behaves. Not even close. 

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., has already sent a demand for correction:

Via Twitter

I don't see how this will get any better as long as Big Climate dominates the field. There are far too many institutional forces that depend on global warming panic to keep their funding. What possible incentive does a university's 'climate science institute' have to disprove the "consensus," given that doing so will, a) create ridicule, b) lead to ostracism, and, c) kill the funding of the institute?

So, since we are told, "the science is settled," I recommend the U.S. government cut its funding of the study of climate by 80% and the remaining 20% (still a large number) be directed by an independent board composed of prominent members of the climate study field with a wide variety of views.