UK Met Office: worthless petition to prop up CRU

Pointless petition

The Met Office is clearly rattled by the CRU revelations, and is running around like a headless chicken trying to drum up support for a petition claiming that climate science is as pure as the driven snow. It seems that anyone can sign, and pressure is being applied to those who don’t:

More than 1700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “integrity and honesty” of global-warming research.

The initiative is a sign of how worried the Met Office is that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions. One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

Met Office chief executive John Hirst and chief scientist Julia Slingo (pictured) wrote to 70 colleagues last Sunday asking them to sign “to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change”.

…

One scientist said he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

So if you don’t sign, you’ll be out on your ear. As Anthony Watts says, the next time anyone criticises the 31,000-odd signatures in The Petition Project, you can point them to this pile of nonsense.

Read it here.