Washington Post: Was a scientific journal canned for disagreeing with the IPCC?

Was a scientific journal canned for disagreeing with the IPCC?

By Jonathan H. Adler,  Published: JANUARY 20, 12:51 PM ET

Copernicus Publications, “the innovative open access publisher,” recently announced it was terminating one of its journals, Pattern Recognition in Physics due to concerns about the journal’s editorial practices

PRP was not even one year old. It seems the problems began when the journal’s editors agreed to a special issue on “Patterns in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts,” in which the issue’s editors had the temerity to “doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project.”(*)

Cool it …

Pointman does it in style. Great piece on freedom of ideas and speech and the dangers of hyperargumentation.

Pointman's

I wrote the following paragraph in a previous piece on fanatics and the subtle perils of prolonged contact with them –

There is also an insidious danger to this sort of interaction with them; you start to get imprinted by them. If you’re not careful, you soon start to take on the same fanatical traits that you’re fighting, which is an even worse outcome. If you look, you’ll see this has happened at some of the more combative blogs on global warming. If the point of blogging is to inform and persuade, then it’s readily apparent that such vicious gladiatorial displays will quickly alienate the average person. It’s for this reason and a lack of proper moderation, that so many once highly respected blogs, have become PR liabilities in the fight against eco-fascism.

The beef this time around is about a special edition of a rather obscure journal called Pattern…

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Lord Monckton: “Copernicus is acting outside mainstream science”

Lord Christopher Monckton offers his thoughts on the Copernicus – Galileogate scandal; the imprisonment of our special edition of PRP behind a front page with no links on it:

Let us wait and see how Copernicus responds to my offer to take over the journal for which it has no further use. It is a shame that a once-respectable publishing house could have censored its own journal in this cack-handed fashion when all it had to do – if it were genuinely concerned that not enough outside reviews had been obtained – was to ask the editors to gather further reviews from external scrutineers.

However, it is plain from the original email sent by the publishers to Professor Moerner that their true reason for attempting (unsuccessfully) to kill off the journal was that its authors had reached a conclusion that – in the mildest way – suggested that the decline in solar activity they now expected would countervail to some extent against any warming effect from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, so that the accelerated warming predicted by the IPCC might not occur, at least in the short term. [Editorial note] That this was the primary reason originally given can be seen in the webcitation linked above. Click image to view.

Nicola Scafetta: Planetary harmonics Derived Forecast On Course

Nicola Scafetta has reminded me to revisit his global average surface temperature (GST) forecast (Cyan area), which he derived from a simple phenomenological model using solar system planetary frequencies at the start of 2012. It is clearly much more accurate than the IPCC projection from 2000 (shown in Green on the figure below).

Click for full size image

See below the break for more information on the Solar-Planetary Theory Nicola used.

Monckton says he’ll take over the shuttered Pattern Recognition in Physics Journal

Watts Up With That?

In an emotional commentary written for the WorldNetDaily (aka WND) Christopher Monckton has said that he’ll take over the journal and publish a first issue in March 2014. He displays what he calls a “mockup cover” (shown below) that consists of his coat of arms along with various cyclic, spirographic, and colorful psychedelic style images of natural and mathematical patterns.

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2014 Bloggies: A few days left until nominations close

The Bloggies are underway again, and the 2014 award nominations have been open since Jan 1. There are a few days left before nominations close on Friday.

Giovanni P. Gregori: Scientific Freedom, paradigms and dogma

prof. Giovanni P. Gregori – Docente di Fisica Terrestre e ricercatore CNR all’Istituto di Acustica O.M.Corbino C.N.R. di Roma. 1963-2001 Ricercatore CNR all’IFA/CNR (Istituto di Fisica dell’Atmosfera), Roma, con l’incarico di studiare le Relazioni Sole-Terra. Le aurore polari ed il geomagnetismo (1963-1975) lo hanno portato ad un modello di magnetosfera (1970-1972) considerato uno dei suoi migliori risultati.

One of our merry band of collaborators on our Special Edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics, the journal axed by executive officer Martin Rasmussen of parent publishing house Copernicus, and castigated by science blogger Anthony Watts, is Italian physics professor Giovanni P. Gregori. here’s the letter he sent to Rasmussen:

Martin Rasmussen, Esq.,
Copernicus Publications.

Ref.: Pattern Recognition in Physics

Dear Mr. Rasmussen,

following the letter by the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, I guess I have to spend a few words on this unfortunate controversy.

I like to begin and recall a few statements by Jules-Henri Poincaré (1854-1912).

“La liberté est pour la Science ce que l’air est pour l’animal”
[“Freedom is for Science much like air for an animal”
Dernières pensées, appendice III]

“La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti,
ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée”
[“Never submit thought to any dogma, or to any party,
or to any passion, or to any interest, or to any idea”]

“La pensée n’est qu’un éclair au milieu d’une longue nuit.
Mais c’est cet éclair qui est tout”
[“Thought is like a lightning in the middle of a long night.
But this lightning is everything”]

Science is made of ideas, both correct and wrong. How can we assess what is correct if this is not compared with what is wrong? Observations, models, extrapolations, forecast, etc. are not science. They are only tentative applications of science. But science is made of ideas.

WUWT demagoguery: Parting of the ways, and new beginnings

I was dismayed this morning to find Anthony Watts had chosen to end strained but outwardly reasonably polite relations with me by throwing down a gauntlet I had no option but to respond to on a comment chain starting last night. This stuff goes back two years, and has been brought to a head by the recent smear campaign Willis Eschenbach and Anthony Watts have launched against the group of honest scientists I have been working with on our special edition of Pattern recognition in physics. The comments reproduced below are from a new thread where Willis Eschenbach misrepresents the work of Professor Jan-Erik Solheim, (University of Oslo Inst of Theoretical Astrophysics) who contributed two papers to our special edition.

tallbloke says:
January 22, 2014 at 8:31 am

Nicola Scafetta says:
January 22, 2014 at 7:43 am
[snip – you are welcome to resumbit without the ad homs – mod]

Yes Nicola, behave yourself on his Nibs thread. Here’s an example of the sort of thing you can’t say:

“Copernicus, as a publisher of scientific journals, cannot afford to become known as a place where reviewers don’t review and editors don’t edit”

Why Phi? – Earth’s secret neighbours

1685 Toro and 1866 Sisyphus may be names you haven’t heard of but they’re
orbiting the Sun in the neighbourhood of our planet. What are they and what
exactly are they doing?

They are known as Apollo asteroids (see footnote) – two of several dozen in fact.

‘They are Earth-crosser asteroids that have orbital semi-major axes greater
than that of the Earth (more than 1 AU) but perihelion distances less than
the Earth’s aphelion distance (which is 1.017 AU).’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_asteroids

What they are doing is orbiting the Earth in interesting synodic relationships
with it. Toro completes 5 orbits of the Sun every 8 Earth years/orbits while 5
Sisyphus orbits take 13 Earth years/orbits, thus 8 Sisyphus = 13 Toro orbits
(as very close approximations). On a longer time scale the figures are:
825 Toro = 1319 Earth orbits (825:1320 = 5:8) and
100 Sisyphus = 163 Toro orbits (100:162.5 = 8:13).

Peer Review Debacle: Friends and Foes in the Fog of Battle

The view from my bedroom window yesterday morning

 

There’s nothing like a good strong ethics controversy to sort out friends from foes, and the last five days have been decisive in laying out the battle lines. The trouble started when James Annan whipped up an email campaign directed at science publisher Copernicus, complaining about our Special Edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics. Although the various proponent authors of the Planetary Solar Theory have different ideas about viable mechanisms we came to the same conclusions via different phenomenological methods: that an imminent solar slowdown is upon us, and it is likely to be deeper than the Dalton Minimum, possibly stretching until the latter decades of this century.

In the General conclusions paper all the contributing authors signed, we agreed that “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”. This did not please the proponents of the ‘trace gas levels control Earth’s climate’ theory, AKA cAGW, and emails trickled into Copernicus headquarters in Gottingen, Germany.

Ozone recovery to nix global warming in S.H. for decades

A new paper in the Royal Meteorological Soc quarterly a review paper finds that stratosperic ozone recovery in the southern hemisphere will have a strong effect on surface temperatures.

Review Article

Climate System Response to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and Recovery

Michael Previdi1,*, Lorenzo M. Polvani1,2

Abstract

We review what is presently known about the climate system response to stratospheric ozone depletion and its projected recovery, focusing on the responses of the atmosphere, ocean and cryosphere. Compared to well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs), the radiative forcing of climate due to observed stratospheric ozone loss is very small: in spite of this, recent trends in stratospheric ozone have caused profound changes in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) climate system, primarily by altering the tropospheric midlatitude jet, which is commonly described as a change in the Southern Annular Mode. Ozone depletion in the late twentieth century was the primary driver of the observed poleward shift of the jet during summer, which has been linked to changes in tropospheric and surface temperatures, clouds and cloud radiative effects, and precipitation at both middle and low latitudes.

BBC: Has the sun gone to sleep?

Has the Sun gone to sleep?

17 January 2014 Last updated at 05:57 GMT

Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of “solar lull” – meaning that it has fallen asleep – and it is baffling them.

History suggests that periods of unusual “solar lull” coincide with bitterly cold winters.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510

Breaking: Pattern Recognition in Physics Axed by Copernicus

A conclusion and its implication in the summary paper was: because our scientific investigation leads us to the prediction that the Sun is headed into a protracted minimum, the warming forecast by the IPCC might not happen.

This has led to the journal being axed by the parent Publishing house Copernicus. The papers are still available at this link
Please download and disseminate them widely.

Heres the letter sent to Coordinating editor Nils Axel Mörner and chief editor Sid Ali Ouadfeul:

Tim Cullen: The Alpha Centauri Connection

In 1922 Ellsworth Huntington recognised that the planets may well influence sunspots.

A study of sunspots suggests that their true periodicity is almost if not exactly identical with that of the orbital revolution of Jupiter, 11.8 years.

Other investigations show numerous remarkable coincidences between sunspots and the orbital revolution of the other planets, including especially Saturn and Mercury.

This seems to indicate that there is some truth in the hypothesis that sunspots and other related disturbances of the solar atmosphere owe their periodicity to the varying effects of the planets as they approach and recede from the sun in their eccentric orbits and as they combine or oppose their effects according to their relative positions.

Climatic Changes: Their Nature and Causes – 1922 – Ellsworth Huntington
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37855
[update:]  PDF version created by Tim  1.2MB [/update]

Andrew McKillop: We Must be Near Peak Crisis by Now

Guest post from Andrew McKiIllop

The World is allegedly Grossly Overpopulated
Writing for the site PeakProsperity, Adam Taggart in early January republished a 2013 presentation by Bill Ryerson of the US Population Institute repeating all the known arguments about exponential population growth but only arithmetic growth (or no growth at all) of the resources we need, think we need, or might some day need. The long discussion by Bill Ryerson was honest by kicking off with the straight admission that talking about population management is inflammatory. Arguing for ZPG or zero population growth is accused by some as “crypto fascist” at worst and misanthropic at best, but early-2014 news includes the fact that Japan – the world leader in ZPG – recorded its highest-ever annual decline of population in 2013, with a loss of about 245 000 citizens. Japan’s contraction of population is now running at about 1 million every 4 years, and can easily accelerate.

Exeter University Climate Change MOOC day #1

Sign up here and join in the fun

End of first section exercise:

Reflect on these key questions:

1. What the key scientific principles that explain climate change including the greenhouse (blanket) effect?
2. What are the key feedback mechanisms that help to explain why our climate is able to “self-regulate”?
3. How can our climate be conceptualised as a system containing a series of components that interact with one another?

Also consider:

Met Office pet, Exeter University launches first online course. Meteorology? No. One guess.

Co-mod writes: Not long ago Tallbloke mentioned MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) as starting to gain traction.

So I am dismayed over be-spoiling of MOOC, usage as a propaganda tool.

Climate Change: Challenges and Solutions. A FREE online course from the University of Exeter

Our very first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) begins on 13th January 2014 on the Open University’s FutureLearn platform, and lasts for eight weeks.

Teaching, factual?

“Issues we will cover include:

We have reached a real tipping point in Earth climate systems. For example, the Greenland ice sheet is melting, raising sea levels, and there’s simply no going back.

Uh huh, speaking from a position of authority, “know or ought to know” better. Let’s see the full proof.

The leader is Mr Tim Lenton working “in partnership with the UK Met Office”. He is rather young. Got himself involved in The Team, Stefan Rahmstorf and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber[5].
Stoat pokes fun “Tim Lenton is silly” and “However, I’m inclined to think that he isn’t a tosser, just naive…”[2] , err.. Stoat, he is one of yours, oh well gave me a chuckle, still not sure what he did.

BA (Cambridge),
PhD (UEA)
[ coy on letting on the whole truth ]

GWPF roundup: The BBC 28gate Scandal is Growing as Labour Govt Connection is Revealed

BBC’s Six-Year Cover-Up Of Secret ‘Green Propaganda’ Training For Top Executives
FOI Documents Reveal Labour Government Funded BBC’s Notorious Climate Seminar

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting. A lobby group with close links to green campaigners, the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT), promised Ministers the seminars would influence programme content for years to come. –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 12 January 2014

Biased BBC Climate reporting ’28gate’ scandal finally exposed in mainstream media.

A story we broke over a year ago here at the talkshop has finally made it into the MSM, Following the conclusion of a protracted legal battle by Tony Newberry to force the publication of the list of attendees at the infamous climate seminar held by the BBC. Congratulations to Tony on this significant victory over the forces of alarmism infesting the BBC.

REPORT BY David Rose in the Mail on Sunday:

Pensioner forces BBC to lift veil on 2006 eco-seminar to top executives

Papers reveal influence of top green campaigners including Greenpeace

Then-head of news Helen Boaden said it impacted a ‘broad range of output’

Yet BBC has spent more than £20,000 in legal fees trying to keep it secret

The true cost of EU Green Energy Policy

From the Telegraph

The EU directive on renewable energy has probably had more impact on how power generation works and the bills paid by households than any other single piece of European legislation.The 2009 directive set the objective of ensuring that 20pc of the energy used by 2020 should come from renewable sources. After sharing out the obligations across the EU, Britain was set the binding target of ensuring that 15pc of energy demand must be met from renewable sources before the end of the decade.

The targets are enforceable in the EU courts, meaning the prospect of a country facing huge daily fines drawing closer as the decade draws to an end. The legislation has certainly kept lawyers busy.