Climate scientists bleating over "attacks from sceptics"

10 March, 2010 by

Out of order

You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s always those filthy sceptics, flat-earthers, deniers. Here we are, just ordinary climate scientists going about our daily lives, fudging data, deleting emails when we get FOI requests, and threatening journals that dare to publish papers that challenge the consensus, and you nasty mean sceptics somehow find that objectionable. If only we could just get on with our skulduggery without your annoying interference:

CSIRO scientists say they are coming under political attack as part of an orchestrated campaign by climate change sceptics.

A delegation of scientists is in Canberra this week to push for bipartisan political support for open debate and diversity in government science. [Open debate? That’ll be the day – Ed]

CSIRO Staff Association president Michael Borgas says scientific integrity is under threat. [Yes, it certainly is, but not from the sceptics, it’s from the climate scientists who have forgotten what being a scientist is all about – Ed]

“It’s a very large concern both internal but in particular externally,” he said.

“Now we’re seeing some quite unprecedented attacks on the integrity of science in the CSIRO, that was in senate estimates recently.”

Dr Borgas says scientists need more support from management.

“We frankly think that the management does make matters worse by appearing to gag comment and exert too much control of the scientists,” he said.

“But we can see that they are attempting to manage the risk that they see from these attacks which are coming from the outside.”

Whose fault is all this? Get your own ship in order before looking for excuses elsewhere.

Read it where? You guessed it. In the ever-impartial ABC.

UPDATE: And Stephen Schneider gets in on the victim act, with this outlandish claim:

”I have hundreds” of threatening emails, Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University in California, told Tierramérica.

He believes scientists will be killed over this. ”I’m not going to let it worry me… but you know it’s going to happen,” said Schneider, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. ”They shoot abortion doctors here.” (source)

Schneider, like all the others, was strangely silent when threats of “Nuremburg Trials”, jail or execution for climate sceptics were being made. Funny that.

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CSIRO scientist resigns over ETS "censorship"

3 December, 2009 by

Censored paper?

Censored paper?

This will cause a stir. Wouldn’t mind seeing some of the internal CSIRO emails either! Too much to hope for, I think…

A senior CSIRO environmental economist has resigned after saying his criticism of the emissions trading scheme (ETS) was censored.

Dr Clive Spash has resigned after three years with CSIRO. For most of this year, he had been in a dispute over the publication of his paper which criticised carbon trading schemes.

Read it here.

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Sea levels "threaten 250,000 homes"

14 November, 2009 by

Rising faster than ever?

Rising faster than ever?

Garbage In Garbage Out Alert: This is the sort of nonsense one gets when one treats as gospel the projections of hopelessly incomplete models. Even the IPCC thinks that sea level rises will only reach 79cm, but Australia’s own alarmist CSIRO goes one better. It has chosen the figure of 1.1m (how?) as the figure to base yet further modelling on the effects to our coastal fringes, and (phew!) comes up with suitably alarmist results which will get printed in every paper in the country. Why not choose 1.5m or 2m? Surely they can find a model that predicts that?

Almost 250,000 homes, now worth up to $63 billion, will be “at risk of inundation” by the end of the century, under “worst-case but plausible” predictions of rising sea levels.

The study — released ahead of the crucial Senate vote on Labor’s emissions trading scheme — modelled the effect of a 1.1m sea-level rise on cities and towns around Australia.

This is a higher level than the 79cm end-of-century rise predicted by the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but in the mid-range of some subsequently published research.

It found between 157,000 and 247,000 homes “at risk of inundation” — meaning they would be permanently flooded or frequently flooded by storm surges or king tides — with hospitals, water-treatment plants and other public buildings also found to be at risk.

Even Sydney airport would be at “increased risk” of inundation, according to the study, written by the Department of Climate Change with input from CSIRO, Geosciences Australia and scores of academics.

…

Andrew Ash, director of the CSIRO climate-change adaption flagship, said the 1.1m sea-level rise was “certainly plausible”.

“As things stand, the only variation will be exactly when we reach that level,” Dr Ash said.

So that could be in 2100, 2500, 3000, then? Climate nonsense.

Read it here.

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CSIRO embroiled in censorship battle

5 November, 2009 by

We reported here about how CSIRO had attempted to suppress the publication of a paper critical of the government’s ETS. Unfortunately, it seems the story just won’t go away:

The CSIRO is grappling with claims it is trying to censor the work of an economist who has criticised the policy at the centre of the Federal Government’s response to climate change.

The researcher, Dr Clive Spash, has been told not to publish a journal article that questions the economic underpinnings of carbon trading versus other means of cutting greenhouse emissions.

Dr Spash is an ecological economist with the sustainable ecosystems division at the organisation.

He told ABC Radio’s AM that he was headhunted to join the CSIRO but wonders if he has a future there if he cannot talk about the subject of his research.

It’s hardly surprising, when you read the following letter from Garth Paltridge in The Australian in May last year:

I HEAR on the scientific grapevine that CSIRO’s biggest problem when providing formal advice to the federal Government on the matter of climate change is to say nothing that can be interpreted as giving aid and comfort to the army of irresponsible sceptics out there who are doubtful about the dreadful consequences of global warming.

One can only feel sorry for the Government. Where can it go these days to get unbiased advice on the issue of global warming? Its official sources are poisoned by the fear among many scientists that they may be labelled by their colleagues and by their institutions as climate-change sceptics. (source – h/t Andrew Bolt)

Read it here.

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CSIRO bid to gag ETS attack

2 November, 2009 by

The CSIRO is supposed to be the nation’s top scientific body, but it is up to its neck in the grubby politics of climate change by attempting to silence a critic of the government’s oh-so-wonderful ETS:

THE nation’s peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government’s climate change policies.

The paper, by the CSIRO’s Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed.

The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.

But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.

In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is “far removed” from the reality of permit markets. “While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases),” he says. “Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
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