Are global warming sceptics the same as Intelligent Design fanatics?
Here at The Dappled Planet, we received a shocking email in response to one sent for “Letters to the Editor” at New Scientist magazine. New Scientist is for the most part, an excellent magazine which tends to present a wide range of new scientific news across a broad variety of science. For every scientist who comes out with some new theory, they will generally tend to find a few sceptics as well – to give one and all a balanced story.
Well, something changed about 3-4 years ago. Suddenly that wasn’t happening with regards to stories on the climate. To a certain extent, that was probably to be expected – the magazine is British and the British seem to have completely bought into the subject to the point of stupidty – as we’ve mentioned other times.
But as impartial as New Scientist is, it has become less and impartial in this issue and finally we felt compelled to send a letter to the New Scientist. This is what we sent (25 October, 2009):
Up until about 4 or 5 years ago, New Scientist magazine was carefully neutral on the issue of Climate Change. And then it seemed to change its policy and began supporting the hysteria about global warming. Since then, there have been practically no articles from the thousands of scientists who publish contradictory evidence to the media hysteria over global warming. Instead the emphasis seems to be all about the mathematical modelling of a potential future with absolutely no effort made to see if this modelling even stands up to the record of past Climate firmly laid out in the rocks. The article, “Earth: The Comeback” (New Scientist, 3 October, 2009) is the latest in sensationalistic journalism. Looking back over a period of 600 million years, we are in a particularly benign period with regards to climate and the conditions the modellers propose have never been seen on Earth – even with higher CO2 concentrations so it is unlikely they will happen now. It is increasingly tiring that New Scientist, a supposedly scientific magazine, no longer does fair reporting on the science of the climate. I have to assume that if you no longer fairly report one scientific issue, then this neglect applies to other articles you write, making you not much better than a tabloid magazine. I just hope you return to proper, fair and balanced researched scientific reporting before I loose interest in to what used to be a respectable scientific magazine.
And this was the (incredible) reply we got back from the Deputy Editor for New Scientist:
Thank you for your letter. Please let me reassure you that our reporting on climate change reflects the current scientific consensus. It is simply not true that thousands of scientists publish contradictory evidence. A few do, but they have failed to persuade their peers that they are right (they are approximately as successful as intelligent design “theorists” are in challenging the theory of evolution). That is how science works; if the current orthodoxy is wrong it will eventually be exposed as such. Until that day we will continue to report the overwhelming consensus, as we do for other scientific disciplines.
Yours sincerely,
GL (name abbreviated just in case but full name was given in the reply…)
Deputy Editor
Good grief -were scientists who disagree with man-made global warming now being equated to Intelligent Design supporters??? In a court of law – and Intelligent Design at least HAS had its day in court, there is no issue at all – there is no proof for Intelligent Design. The evidence is overwhemlingly against it.
But for global warming… one doesn’t have to dig very deep to start finding contradictory evidence. Ian Plimer in Heaven and Earth, managed to find over 2300 scientific papers all pointing to a more natural origin about any (if any) warming we are experiencing, and the perils of ignoring the fact if CO2 is not causing warming… then we aren’t going to stop it by controlling our own minute annual CO2 contribution.
Sadly though, unlike Intelligent Design, man-made global warming hasn’t has its day in court – although the decimation by the British themselves of Al Gores’s movie, An Incovenient Truth, is a start.
However, not at all impressed to be equated to Intelligent Design fanatics when we are trying to point out that focusing on rising CO2 emissions might be the eroneous thing to do if we really want to adapt to upcoming changes in the environment, we fired back with this (comparatively mild) response (sent 17 November, 2009):
We will have to agree to differ. In the pharmaceutical industry, a negative or null result generally does not get published – an issue New Scientist has raised. In the realm of climate science, a paper which looks at the Earth’s entire history to see if the predictions of climate modellers are supported is generally not published either. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, we DO have a history of past climate on this planet – a history which has been fairly accurately documented to at least 650 million years and one which can be fairly well estimated to 2000 million years. There is ample evidence the world has been warmer for most of that time – and ample evidence the CO2 levels have been up to 10 times higher DURING AN ICE AGE.
With regards to publishing discouraging results from the pharmaceutical industry, there is a greater cry for public disclosure of who sponsored the scientists work and for negative/null results to be published. Maybe the same thing needs to be applied to the papers currently being published by climate modellers – who sponsored them? Anti-’carbon’ governments or legitimate funders? And where are the papers by the 1000s (and there are 1000s) of exasperated scientists who can’t get their work published who contradict the work of climate modellers.
If mathematical modellers can’t even predict the stock market tomorrow or the weather a week from tomorrow – because of variables they have not been able to factor into their computer simulation, then other people need to be able to speak about the problems and limitations of the climate models.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:08 am
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