A New Religion That’ll Bring Ya To Your Knees

City Journal featured an important article that bears careful reading.  It’s long and definitely won’t hold the attention of the people that most need to read it.    It’s called An Unsettling Climate.   The article is about the transformation of science into dogma and religion.  In particular it deals with the perils of questioning the presumption that “the science is settled.”

Woe unto those who have the temerity to suggest that this might not be the case, never mind the facts.   Some things must not be questioned, as was discovered by American atmospheric physicist Murry Salby.  

In April 2013, concluding a European tour to present his research, Salby arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for a flight back to Australia, where he was a professor of climate science at Macquarie University. He discovered, to his dismay, that the university had canceled the return leg of his nonrefundable ticket. 

Salby hasn’t been working in a vacuum. Swedish climate scientist Pehr Björnbom has replicated his finding that temperature drives CO2 emission. University of Oslo geosciences professor Ole Humlum published a landmark 2012 paper demonstrating that changes of CO2 follow changes of temperature, implying the same cause and effect. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist at MIT, believes that Salby is correct about the IPCC’s failure to evaluate the effects of diffusion in ice cores on the proxy CO2 record and to consider sources of lighter carbon other than fossil-fuel burning. Salby is a “serious scientist” whose arguments deserve a hearing, Lindzen says. Fritz Vahrenholt, a former environmental official and CEO of a large renewable-energy company, as well as one of Germany’s leading climate-change skeptics, found Salby’s analysis of CO2 emission levels lagging temperature changes compelling. “Murry Salby opened a door for more investigations and further scientific work,” Vahrenholt says. Will the scientific community pursue the questions that Salby has raised? Vahrenholt is doubtful. “Upholders of AGW don’t take part in discussions where their orthodox view is challenged,” he complains. One way they block off inquiry is to ensure that papers by dissenting climate scientists are not included in the peer-review literature—a problem that Lindzen and Bengtsson have encountered. Indeed, that is what happened to Salby. He submitted a paper on his initial findings to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Finding no errors—one reviewer called it “absolutely amazing”—the journal required minor revision. Before Salby could return the revised paper for publication, the editor of a different journal, Remote Sensing, resigned for publishing a paper that departed from the IPCC view, penning an abject confession: “From a purely formal point of view, there were no errors with the review process. But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate skeptic notions of the authors.” Shortly afterward, Salby received a letter rejecting his revised paper on the basis of a second reviewer’s claim—contradicted by the first reviewer—that his paper offered nothing new and that all of it had already been covered in the IPCC’s reports.

So much for peer review and unbiased science.