Consensus Enforcement Fascism

The Consensus Enforcement Squad has been active. Research that calls into question the Climate Emergency narrative is apparently too dangerous for discussion. The term "science fascism" comes to mind.
Team Climate Crisis Resorts to Bullying, Again
Kip Hansen
One would think that the public relations fiasco that stuck climate science (and sullied the reputation of science in general) as a result of ClimateGate back in 2009 would restrain climate scientists from attempting to suppress published peer-reviewed studies that they “don’t like” or the conclusions of which are “not helpful” to their climate crisis advocacy positions.

But, it appears that Michael Mann and his cronies are at it again forcing the retraction of a paper published last January (2022), in the European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP), a peer-reviewed academic journal (one of the 2,900 journals published through Springer Nature). That paper is titled, “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” by Gianluca Alimonti, Luigi Mariani, Franco Prodi and Renato Angelo Ricci. [hereafter, Alimonti (2022)]. . . . .

The inestimable Roger Pielke Jr. covers the ongoing story on his substack piece: “Think of the Implications of Publishing — A whistleblower shares shocking details of corruption of peer review in climate science” first published on Jul 17, 2023. Do read Pielke’s piece for his insight into all the gory details. . . .

5. Here I quote Roger Pielke Jr. from his substack (here):

“To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.” . . . .

 

Wrong think will be deleted....

 

Inappropriate commentary in a paper seems good enough for retraction, but then the question becomes why wasn't it addressed in the peer review stage? That's a perfect thing to be addressed in peer review, "Discussion section overstates conclusions that can be drawn from the research presented, please revise," for example. It is a little odd that nuclear physicists are publishing on this topic. Looking more, it appears it wasn't actually a study, but rather a review that cherrypicked stuff, and even misrepresented/misinterpreted things they cherrypicked. Yeah, too bad they didn't catch it on peer review.

 

Author’s Comment:

First, while I agree fully with the chief findings of Alimonti et al.: There is no climate emergency – there is no climate crisis. I would not have written the same “Conclusion” section found at the end of their paper. However, they have every right to state their opinions clearly and as loudly as they wish – without having their paper attacked and suppressed by the climate crisis bullies.

 

Climate fascism is on the march.

The Climategate Gang Rides Again!
Kip Hansen
The renewed and reinforced Climategate Gang has risen once more, bullying Springer Nature Publishing into retracting a peer-reviewed paper by colluding with the climate crisis news cabal, featuring The Guardian,…

 

And yet, it moves.
How Science is Done These Days
Guest Blogger
his new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. . . . .

 

• Paper that found ‘climate crisis’ to be ‘not evident yet’ retracted after re-review

 

Fake Science = “Scientism” = authoritarian nonsense = Fascism

“Scientism" in politics still presupposes that human welfare is its object, a concept which is utterly alien to totalitarianism. 10 It is precisely because the utilitarian core of ideologies was taken for granted that the anti-utilitarian behavior of totalitarian governments, their complete indifference to mass interest, has been such a shock. This introduced into contemporary politics an element of unheard-of unpredictability. Totalitarian propaganda, however — although in the form of shifted emphasis — indicated even before totalitarianism could seize power how far the masses had drifted from mere concern with interest."
THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, Totalitarianism in Power, By Hannah Arendt, Meridian Books,New York, 1958. p. 348. (emphasis mine)

 

Updated.
The Climategate Gang Rides Again!
Kip Hansen
The renewed and reinforced Climategate Gang has risen once more, bullying Springer Nature Publishing into retracting a peer-reviewed paper by colluding with the climate crisis news cabal, featuring The Guardian,…

 

I believe humans are having an effect, but I do not think humans will change, I think we are like bacteria in a petri dish, we will keep consuming and reproducing until we can not anymore

 

The Consensus Enforcement Fascists are active.
Free Speech Suppressed Everywhere You Turn
August 27, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Free speech today is under assault from the Left everywhere and all the time.
  
  
• You already know about the federal government’s pervasive Censorship Industrial Complex, pressuring all the big social media companies to suppress what they deem “misinformation” about any subject important to the current dominant political narrative (Covid-19, climate change, etc.). . . .
  

Alimonte, et al., paper in European Physical Journal Plus

If you wonder why the climate alarm narrative seems so completely to dominate public discussion (even though it is utter nonsense), then you need to understand that there is an orthodoxy enforcement police operating behind the scenes. Most of the time the operation of this orthodoxy enforcement mechanism is invisible to the general public. Climate skeptics can’t get jobs in academia, and go into other careers; when skeptics write papers, they get rejected, and are never heard from again. But every once in a while something happens to bring aspects of the orthodoxy enforcement mechanism momentarily into the open. That has recently occurred with respect to a paper published in a European scientific journal in early 2022.

In January 2022 the European science journal called European Physical Journal Plus (part of the Springer Nature collection of journals) published a paper by Gianluca Alimonte and colleagues with the title “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming.” The paper is essentially a review of trends in various sorts of extreme weather events since the early 20th century, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and so forth. The bottom line from the article is that there are no noticeable trends in the frequency or severity of these extreme weather events during recent years. For example, the summary as to hurricanes is “To date, global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes.” Here is the graph as to numbers of hurricanes and tropical storms and accumulated energy of same:


Surely no trends are visible there. And here are the key concluding sentences from the abstract:

None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.

That last observation seems to be the one that just could not be allowed. It appears that a group of orthodoxy enforcers from academia and journalism ganged up to go to Springer Nature to demand retraction of the Alimonte, et al. paper. There followed a lengthy back and forth, which ended with the paper being retracted on August 23, 2023. A whistleblower at Springer Nature leaked the back and forth to Roger Pielke, Jr., who has published two pieces about it on his Substack, the first on July 17, and the second on August 26. You can read those two lengthy pieces for all the details.

From the Pielke July 17 piece, the pile-on began about a year ago:

[E]ight months [after publication of Alimonte, et al.], following some discussion of the paper in the Australian media, The Guardian wrote an article severely criticizing the paper. The Guardian quoted four scientists critical of the paper: Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, and Michael Mann.

As an example of the nature of the criticisms, Pielke quotes the execrable Michael Mann, whose comments Pielke describes as “scathing and personal.” They are also notably non-substantive, appealing to consensus without disputing the accuracy of any of the data:

[This is] another example of scientists from totally unrelated fields coming in and naively applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand. Either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong.

As Pielke documents, there was no allegation of scientific fraud or misconduct of any sort. This was purely a case of Mann and his henchmen demanding a retraction over a matter of disagreement with the conclusion. Alimonte, et al. stood behind their work and declined to retract. And Springer then bowed to Mann’s bullying and retracted the article on August 23.

Meanwhile, go to the (now-retracted) Alimonte, et al., paper, and look at the graphs. It is obvious that there is no trend in extreme weather events. There is no getting around this. But it is not allowed to be said in “prestigious” publications like the Springer science journals.

Or, by the way, you can go to Joe D’Aleo’s excellent website, icecap.us, where there is a frequently updated section headed “Climate Alarmist Claim Fact Checks” with the latest data on trends in all extreme weather events.

Pielke mildly criticizes Alimonte, et al., for their “editorializing” about the lack of any climate crisis discernible in the data. Meanwhile, he notes that he did a Google search that turned up some 300,000 papers asserting the existence of a climate crisis. A few hundred billion dollars of government money can buy a lot of fake climate alarmism. . . .

 

ALARMIST MESSENGERS/CLAIMS
Media Ignores Story of Unjustified Retraction of a Climate Skeptical Paper Due to Bullying
September 1, 2023

 

By their silence the alarmists have forfeited any credibility in speaking up for science.
Media Ignores Story of Unjustified Retraction of a Climate Skeptical Paper Due to Bullying
Anthony Watts
Reprehensible behavior by journal editors in retracting a widely read climate paper (80,000 downloads) over politically inconvenient conclusions. Journal editors asked me to adjudicate, and my findings were in favor…

 

Entrenched Senior scientists can get away with fudging the data for a 'politically correct cause’.

“We also uncover that retracted authors who remain active in publishing maintain and establish more collaborations compared to their similar non-retracted counterparts. Nevertheless, retracted authors with less than a decade of publishing experience retain less senior, less productive and less impactful coauthors, and gain less senior coauthors post-retraction. Taken together, notwithstanding the indispensable role of retractions in upholding the integrity of the academic community, our findings shed light on the disproportionate impact that retractions impose on early-career authors.”

Characterizing the effect of retractions on scientific careers Shahan Ali Memon, Kinga Makovi* , Bedoor AlShebli* Social Science Division, New York University Abu Dhabi, 19 July, 2023. (emphasis mine)
*Corresponding author emails: km2537@nyu.edu, bedoor@nyu.edu
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06710.pdf

 

Yup, "noble cause corruption."

 

Fake Science = Political Scientism

"To do that (reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climactic change) we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the publics imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This "double ethical bind" that we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "Discover" magazine, Oct. 1989. In 1991 Schneider won the AAAS(American Association for the Advancement of Science) "Award for the Public Understanding of Science." Paul R. Gross, and Norman Levitt, "Higher Superstition," Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp 167,168. (Emphasis mine)

https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DetroitNews.pdf
https://climatesight.org/2009/04/12/the-schneider-quote/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider_(scientist)
https://710wor.iheart.com/featured/...of-120-years-of-climate-scares-by-scientists/
https://climatism.wordpress.com/201...-97-consensus-and-compliant-mainstream-media/

 

There's a price to be paid to get science published these days.
I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published
Charles Rotter
To put it another way, I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and…

 

Power corrupts, as always.
The Great Climate Change Science Bottleneck
Charles Rotter
It’s essential to understand the underlying power dynamics that shape the narrative. . . .

 

Well, I suppose somebody has to decide when to ignore and suppress inconvenient data.

“Over the last few years, more and more organisations have been employing Decision Scientists. And I’m not just talking about niche startups in Silicon Valley — I’m talking about mammoth organisations from Meta to Manchester United and everyone in between.

But what on earth do Decision Scientists actually do? And how should those of us working in traditional Data Science react to the rise of Decision Science?
Introducing Decision Science: the ***shy*** younger sibling of Data Science
According to Cassie Kozyrkov, the aforementioned Chief Decision Scientist at Google, Decision Science is the discipline of turning information into actions.
It’s the science of selecting between options.”
Is Decision Science Quietly Becoming the New Data Science?, Many of the world’s top companies have started hiring Decision Scientists. Is this the quiet beginning of a new era?, By Matt Chapman, August 2, 2023.
https://towardsdatascience.com/is-d...ly-becoming-the-new-data-science-5616a12fa9e8

And why is the "sibling" so "shy"?

 

The RealClimate blog is a center of climate fascist consensus enforcement. Here's a case study of their work to repress scientific inquiry.
Reply to erroneous claims by RealClimate.org on our research into the Sun’s role in climate change
Guest Blogger
Dr. Schmidt and the RealClimate team apparently do not want you to read our papers. They seem to be afraid that if you did, their claims on climate change would…


From CERES-Science

By the CERES Team

In the last month, we have co-authored three papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals collectively dealing with the twin problems of (1) urbanization bias and (2) the ongoing debates over Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) datasets:

1. Soon et al. (2023). Climate. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179. (Open access)
2. Connolly et al. (2023). Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. (Still in press, but pre-print available here)
3. Katata, Connolly and O’Neill (2023). Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1. (Open access)

All three papers have implications for the scientifically challenging problem of the detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change. Many of our insights were overlooked by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their last three Assessment Reports (AR), i.e., IPCC AR4 (2007), IPCC AR5 (2013) and IPCC AR6 (2021). This means that the IPCC’s highly influential claims in those reports that the long-term global warming since the 19th century was “mostly human-caused” and predominantly due to greenhouse gas emissions were scientifically premature and the scientific community will need to revisit them.

So far, the feedback on these papers has been very encouraging. In particular, Soon et al. (2023) seems to be generating considerable interest, with the article being viewed more than 20,000 times on the journal website in the first 10 days since it was published.

However, some scientists who have been actively promoting the IPCC’s attribution statements over the years appear to be quite upset by the interest in our new scientific papers.

This week (September 6th, 2023), a website called RealClimate.org published a blog post by one of their contributors, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS). In this post, Dr. Schmidt is trying to discredit our analysis in Soon et al. (2023), one of our three new papers, using “straw-man” arguments and demonstrably false claims. . . .

 

The climate fascists remain a menace to science.
The Wolf and the Lamb — Alimonti et al. 2022
Kip Hansen
I had hoped that with climate science had gotten beyond this sort of tragic misbehavior. The silence of other scientists in the field has been even more appalling that the…

 

Are they fascists? Or McCarthyites? Does it matter?
Are you or Have you Ever Published the Work of a Climate Skeptic?
Eric Worrall
Dr. Willie Soon emailed me the curious case of an editor of the journal Climate apparently being investigated by NASA GISS director Gavin Schmidt, for publishing Soon’s study. . . .

 

Here's a proper retraction, for comparison.
Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown

via Wageningen University

It was that rarest of things: a sliver of good news about climate change.

According to calculations published last year in Nature, our planet was keeping pace, and then some, with rising emissions from tropical forest clearance by gobbling up more and more atmospheric carbon.

“What we can mainly prove is that the worst nightmare scenarios of an impaired carbon sink have not yet materialised and that the news is not quite as bad,” Guido van der Werf, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a press release at the time. . . .

But on Monday, Nature retracted the article, “New land-use-change emissions indicate a declining CO2 airborne fraction.” It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and was covered on at least one climate-skeptic blog.

Writing in the retraction notice, van der Werf and his colleagues acknowledged that their “statistical approach needs to be corrected and therefore accept a retraction as requested by the editor.”. . . .

Continue reading

 

The consensus enforcers cannot prevail against science.
Dr. Matthew Wielicki: I Refuse to Stay Silent about Climate Change
Charles Rotter
Dr. Wielicki shares his story and encourages the next generation to reject the doomsday narrative and maintain hope for the future. . . .

 

What a story - sadly, he's not the outlier for dedicated climate scientists; It seems that too many have been coerced not to agree, or enchanted by the power and adulation that comes with joining the climate catastrophe cult.

This book, although as dry as a desert is a superb history on how climate science morphed into climate pseudo-communism. As I said this is not a summer beach read but it traces the commingling of science and politics from the "Ozone Hole" days of the 60's and 70's to the creation of the IPCC and its prioritization of political power and "social justice" above science.