Looking at the news, it suddenly occurred to me how different the news coverage is now. Gone are the “global warming could …” End species/destroy civilisation/cause panic/cause extremes of whatever is your favourite fear. In comes: Editor Resigns Over Global Warming Paper, Blames Forbes, Gerald Warner: Inconvenient CLOUD rains on the global warming parade, Politics Overtaking Science in Global Warming Debate, and on a related subject: Environment policy reforms to add £300 to energy bills
Household energy bills will rise by more than £300 a year as a result of the Coalition’s green policies, a senior Downing Street adviser has told David Cameron.(Telegraph)
There’s no doubt that the politics of global warming & energy is now the story not the story of global warming. CERN/Svensmark clearly dealt a severe blow, but Spencer & Braswell (On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance) seems to have been the last straw. They could control the CERN news release so that New Scientist was able to report they clear link to solar activity as “yet more ways humans are impacting the climate” (by a reference to the speculation that human produced chemicals may assist nuclination – i.e could cause GLOBAL COOLING!!!). But, they couldn’t control Spencer. Presumably after trying to get the editor force those doing the peer review to change their mind and condemn a perfectly good paper, they did the next best trick and got their stooge to resign (throw out the rattle) with the intention of condemning the paper by implication rather than evidence.
But, that strategy has wholly backfired. Instead they have created a whole lot of new publicity for the paper, which most people and journalists would not have known about if they had just quietly brought out their standard “it’s all wrong cause we say so” paper, buddy reviewed and published in a few months by a lapdog editor. (it takes years for sceptical work to get published).
Talk of shooting themselves in the foot: they may as well have put a 1000mile high neon sign with “read Spencer and Braswell’s paper” above the earth – and it all helps publicise the solar activity link which they have been trying to repress – and it demonstrates that there really has been a concerted effort to repress at all costs, even going to the ridiculous extreme of an editor resigning because he published a paper that was peer reviewed, but somehow after publication became “untouchable”.
If you’ve ever watched a shark feeding frenzy, it all starts pretty “quietly”. The prey, makes a mistake, and one shark takes a bite. Then there is that split second between the first shark having taken the bite and the rest of them going in for the kill. Is the resignation of this editor that first mistake? Will the rest of the media pack smell the blood and come in to take their piece of the action?
