“Climategate”: Peer-Review System Was Hijacked By Warming Alarmists

Steve Watson
Infowars
Nov. 24, 2009

One of the most striking revelations to immediately emerge from the “climategate” scandal has been references to efforts by scientists espousing the human-caused warming theory to exclude contrary viewpoints from important scientific publications.

Among the thousands of emails and documents hacked or leaked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University last week are several references to an agenda to shut down scientific debate on global warming by stifling counter-evidence from other scientists.

Dating back to 1996, the emails show that both U.S. and U.K. based scientists referred to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation”,“misinformation” or “crap” that needs to be kept out of the public domain.

The emails include deliberations amongst the scientists regarding efforts to make sure that reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change include their own research and exclude that of dissenting scientists.

In one of the emails, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

This is a startling quote, given that Jones and Mann as climate scientists have the authority to review papers and determine whether they are eligible to be published by scientific journals.

Mann even discussed how to destroy a journal that had published papers with contrary views, telling his colleagues that he believed it had been “hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board” who had “staged a coup”.

“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Mann wrote.

In another of the emails, Tom Wigley, climate scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), says that the journal in question, Climate Research, “encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’”.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Wigley noted that the publisher of the journal should be told that it is being “perceived” as a vehicle of “misinformation”, adding that the word “perceived” should be emphasized because “whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about– it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.”

Wigley also wrote that a group of 50+ scientists could be gotten together to put their names to a letter to add weight to the claim and hopefully help to remove the editorial board of the journal.

Other emails show that some of the scientists declined to make their data available to independent scientists whose views they disagreed with, clear evidence that they were simply unwilling to engage in scientific debate – a core ethic of the scientific community.

Renowned climate scientist Dr Tim Ball sums up the stunning gravitas of the leaks with regards to the process of peer-reviewing and the publication of papers on climate change in journals.

"What you've got here is confirmation of the small group of scientists who, by the way, Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick, he identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peer-reviewing each other's literature.” Dr Ball explains.

“So there's a classic example of the kind of thing that bothered me. About twenty years ago, I started saying "˜Well why are they pushing the peer review?'… And now of course we realise it's because they had control of their own process. That's clearly exposed in these emails."

"On a global scale it's frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they've manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on...."

We have long covered the fact that the so called “scientific consensus” on global warming is wholly manufactured and that there are thousands of scientists who have differing viewpoints to the human-induced warming theorists.

Indeed, over two years ago we reported the fact that a survey of over 500 peer reviewed scientific research papers on climate change, written between 2004 and 2007, concluded that less than half endorsed the “consensus view,” that human activity is contributing to considerable global climate change.

We now have clear evidence that a concerted effort has been made by the IPCC connected climate scientists to block dissenting opinion on climate change, regardless of it’s scientific merit.

“This is horrible,” said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is directly threatened with physical violence in the emails. “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.”

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, “It’s disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested.”