Specter of Climategate

Originally published here.

Climategate was an ugly blot on the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the consensed climate science community and the IPCC in which they participated. The release of a batch of e-mails among a number of climate scientists in 2009 laid bare a coordinated effort to manage the consensus climate narrative by controlling which scientific studies were included in the IPCC assessments. This release was met with complaints that the e-mails released “lacked context”. This triggered a second e-mail release which provided the necessary and equally damning context and was followed later by a third release of all of the “purloined” e-mails collected by “Mr. FOIA”.

The activities disclosed in the e-mails included:

“cherry-picking” data;
refusing to release data for review by other scientists;
threatening to destroy data rather than share it with other scientists;
corrupting the peer review process;
ignoring scientific studies which did not conform with their consensus;
threatening the careers of scientific journal editors; and,
attempting to destroy the careers of skeptical scientists.

A series of investigations of this conduct did not find any violations of law, but rather numerous violations of good scientific practice and ethics. The investigations attempted to put an end to the Climategate controversy. Regrettably, they did not put an end to the activities which triggered the controversy.

Perhaps the most egregious of the continuing practices are the efforts to keep scientific studies which do not conform with the consensus from publication and from inclusion in the periodic scientific assessments prepared by the IPCC.

Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder recently reported that he had been informed by an editor at the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that he should not bother to submit material for publication because PNAS would not be able to find peer reviewers willing to review and comment upon his work.

Professor Pielke also reports that the contents of a paper submitted to IPCC for consideration in AR6 regarding disaster loss normalization were ignored, with the exception of a single “outlier” paper which fit the consensus.

Professor Emeritus Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has reported that two journal editors were fired after publishing papers he had submitted.

The consensed climate science community was successful in creating a toxic professional environment which caused Sally Baliunas and Judith Curry to leave university positions in the climate field. They were also successful in having Dr. David Legates removed as the Maryland State Climatologist based on his skepticism.

Climate researchers including Dr. Wei-Hock Soon, Dr. William Happer, Dr. William van Wijngaarden and others continue to report difficulty having their scientific papers published in US scientific journals and have resorted to publication in peer-reviewed foreign journals. Some have even resorted to “crowd review” on internet sites to get their work into the public domain.

These continuing actions by the consensed climate science community certainly do not conform to proper scientific practice and could properly be described using the epithet “anti-science”, which they frequently throw at skeptics.