One person above mentions astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, also one of the signers of the recent Wall Street Journal letter. His finding a decade ago the orbit of our solar system clearly matches the amounts of carbon 14 (created in the upper atmosphere by the impact of galactic cosmic rays) that appear in our ecosystem, and that also matched the findings of geochemist Jan Veizer who was on the verge of abandoning his studies of oxygen isotope ratios of ocean shellfish. His temperature graph of nearly the entire Phanerozoic, the last 500+ million years of visible life on the planet, didn’t match anything he could find, especially CO2, which is what he was expecting.

The correlation with CO2 was poor, but the correlation with galactic cosmic rays was phenomenal. See “Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?” Shaviv & Veizer 2003. Integrated over literally tens of thousands of solar cycles and 100′s of Milankovich cycles, the effects of GCR are shown to be the cause of the *averaged* temps of equatorial oceans to vary by about 7C.. There is no possible way for GCR not to be the cause, because there’s absolutely no possibility that the temps of our oceans caused stars to go supernovae, the source of those GCR, millions of years earlier. Perhaps the Bad Astronomer can prove that wrong but I suspect that is beyond even his ability to conjure up.

There have been a number of advances in physics contrary to “the consensus” since the IPCC set off to show how bad CO2 was. Svensmark’s SKY paved the way for CLOUD’s funding to be reinstated. There have since been (Svensmark again) clear indications that short term decreases in GCR called Forbush events cause significant drops in low level cloud volume and moisture content. There have been a number of other important papers starting with Friis-Christensen’s 1991 paper showing a good correlation of solar cycle length and world temperatures, but it was Svensmark that the Bad Astronomer just couldn’t bring himself to name in the sixth paragraph in the post that started this thread:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/the-discover-interview-henrik-svensmark/

Eventually the effort to demonize CO2 will stop. It was something like 2000ppm when our earliest mammalian ancestors were scampering about on all fours in the Triassic park, and we’ll run out of cost effective fossil fuels long before it gets halfway there.

“Look at Nigel Calder’s credentials – one can’t dismiss him.”

No, one can’t dismiss the fact that he is a journalist with a book to sell, rather than a climate scientist. Or that he often goes off on paranoid rants about how mainstream science stifles nay sayers but provides little evidence for such activities.

http://safle.org/wordpress/2007/02/20/a-graph-that-suggests-nigel-calder-is-wrong-on-climate-change.html

Here is a good rebuttal of Calders’ opinions.

http://www.frogworth.com/stuart/blog/?p=43

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/09/12/climate-scam-97-of-climate-scientists-are-in-consensus-is-a-lie/

What, so you’re saying that high-altitude jets emit cosmic rays, or what?

According to this paper:

D.J. Travis, A. Carleton and R.G. Lauritsen, “Contrails reduce daily temperature range”,

the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures rose during the three-day grounding of aircraft following the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Thank you for telling me what I already know. I knew that already, and you can find me hammering that point home repeatedly.

This did not seem to be what your comments were saying. Apologies if I misunderstood.

I hope we can one day truly harness the forces this planet receives and gives, sometimes I believe that if it were not for certain religious powers we would be a couple hundred years further in our technology, imagine what life would have been like if Einstein had the use of something like Hubble Telescope or Nikola Tesla the use of the many instruments and materials we have today?

Keep create ideas to move us forward, progressive ideas are not cancerous.

But you were clear. I keep quoting you all the time to make sure there’s no mistake.

…quit doing things like forcing respected scientists to resign over publishing dissenting papers in impact journals.
(…)
Very scientific. Simply publish something that disagrees and get hounded out of your job.

You are wrong. This is all your own spin.
Nobody forced Wagner to resign. READ Wagner’s letter of resignation.
Nobody hounded him. Read WAGNER’S letter of resignation.
His resignation was not a question of publishing a dissenting paper.
Read HIS resignation letter.
How hard can it be? Sheesh.

The only reason there are these resignations is because of the politically charged nature of the trouble.

Then I look forward to you presenting primary evidence from the actual resigners themselves in their own words that back up your assertion. I don’t really care about anything else.

Anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.-Christopher Hitchins.

I do not want to wake up in world where scientific debate is determined by the blogosphere.

It isn’t and it hasn’t been in this case. Read the damn resignation letter. Spencer was not doing anything new. The flaws in his paper were painfully obvious even without the help of the blogosphere. Again, read the resignation letter. It’s all explained in his own words.

If I have been unclear, let me make it more clear. I have never seen anything like this, except in response to massively politicized situations. There is one parallel that springs to mind, that of the unfortunate case of Dr. Greenfield:

Recently, Surgery News, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of . . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:

They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

As this was the Valentine’s issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a “light-hearted” note:
Now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors, Surgery News withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The New York Times solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was “glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned.” But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said “the resignation would not end the controversy.”

Your link proves the point. The only reason there are these resignations is because of the politically charged nature of the trouble. You can say, “Oh but James Inhofe will take this and go – ” who gives a damn what Inhofe or any other politco/thinktank/commentator thinks? This is Science, not politics.

I would quite happily explain to anyone who tried it on that one paper does not trump the IPCC consensus, any more than, for that matter, people like Hansen and their work does.

Finally

The man was considered a joke well before this latest scandalously bad paper.

Yes, a “joke” who publishes in Science and Geophysics Research Letters. If you want to trash his work, get degree and get published in the journals, because that is where the debate happens.

And yes, I do know that he is a creationist whackjob. That’s not the point. I’m not defending the man or the paper, but the process. I do not want to wake up in world where scientific debate is determined by the blogosphere.

Ah, short term memory loss.
That’s not what you claimed on this thread.

…quit doing things like forcing respected scientists to resign over publishing dissenting papers in impact journals.

How did “they” go about “forcing” anyone to resign?
Was the problem that the paper “dissented”?

Very scientific. Simply publish something that disagrees and get hounded out of your job.

According to Wagner himself, nobody forced him to do anything.
According to WAgner himself, the problem was not that the paper “dissented” anything. In fact, he specifically addressed that idea and dismissed it.
You are just making stuff up.
There was no “hounding”.
Read the letter and stop trying to spin his words. Let the man speak for himself.

Unless…
Unless…
You believe that the letter he himself wrote was faked by “them”?

I have seen plenty of crummy papers in my time, I have not seen any behavior like this.

This has happened before. It’s nothing new. Spencer is doing what he always does. The man was considered a joke well before this latest scandalously bad paper. He’ll do it again someday soon.
(shrug)

You are really working my last good nerve here. I repeat: I have seen plenty of crummy papers in my time, I have not seen any behavior like this. Heck, in my field forty years of research just came tumbling down, and the assumption of honesty holds. People have just kept straight on working.

More importantly, notice what is not happening. That paper – if it so flawed – is not being retracted. I doubt that it would be. The reason being that I can apply a number of the criticisms made by the chaps at RealClimate where this heat is coming from, to papers published in the most topline journals.

Nigel,

Criticism – sometimes pretty vehement and intensive – is a part of the scientific process. The case for AGW has been through this process and survived. How did it do this? By getting better data and more support more more different threads of evidence. Now there is a consensus among climatologists. To the best of our knowledge, AGW is real.

Thank you for telling me what I already know. I knew that already, and you can find me hammering that point home repeatedly.

What is not, however, agreed on at all is how much, to what extent, what precise feedback mechanisms are in play, what proportion is human caused, what the effects will be, what we can do about it, etc.

That’s the reason I’m so ticked here. I firmly believe that it’s not what you think, but how you think. Let’s take the papers central argument, for the sake of the argument, that radiative forcing is much more important than we thought. Let’s say that global warming is 75% radiative forcing, 25% manmade, for example. Is that comforting? No; it means that there’s even less we can do about it, and that it might take a lot less to push us over a limit where something really horrible happens.

One way of looking at things, to be sure. It’s the start of at least a possible investigation, and a line of argument, one now disbarred. Terrific.

Isn’t it great to see the other side of a debate getting rejected from the comments

What debate?

On the one hand, you have the fact (as far as anyone can tell) that AGW is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, you have obfuscation and a smear campaign to discredit good-quality, sound science. This is not a debate.

What we should do to remediate AGW – that’s a debate that we absolutely should be having.

Very scientific. Simply publish something that disagrees and get hounded out of your job.

The text you quoted does not support this thesis.

According to your quote, Wagner agreed with criticisms of his work, and is stepping down as a consequence. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it.

Criticism – sometimes pretty vehement and intensive – is a part of the scientific process. The case for AGW has been through this process and survived. How did it do this? By getting better data and more support more more different threads of evidence. Now there is a consensus among climatologists. To the best of our knowledge, AGW is real.

In contrast, Wagner must realise that his work is flawed. If he were still convinced that his conclusions were sound (i.e. if he disagreed with the criticism of his work) he would not step down, as this is just a normal part of the process of doing science. Where does he speak of being “hounded” (your word)? Does he allude to being pressured to resign? Does he name anyone who levels unreasonable or unjust criticism at his work?

In short, you have claimed one thing but then failed to deliver the goods.

If global warming is caused by people, would the solution be to reduce global human population to what it was before the industrial revolution? Fewer people equals less global warming?

The trouble is, John, that it’s not people exactly, its our activities – specifically, intensive agriculture, making cement and burning fossil fuels – that have caused the recent increase in global temperatures. Fewer people who burn more resources would have the same effect. Conversely, the same number of people burning fewer resources would have a lesser effect than we currently do.

Then why didn’t he say that in his resignation letter?
Did someone hold a gun to his head to force him to not say that?
Hmm.
He stated his reasons very clearly in plain English. Nowhere does he claim that somebody forced him to resign. That’s all coming from you. It was his decision to make and he did it to make a statement. You are engaging in spin. Read his letter.

His letter made it clear that the problem was not that the paper disagreed with anything.
You are making things up or some blog planted that idea in your head.
Read the letter itself as opposed to letting people tell you what it said.
Read it in full.
The man can speak for himself using his own words.

So, not only has a good man’s career been wrecked, scientific discourse itself get’s poisoned.

You get all that from an editor resigning? Hyperbole much?

If he had any guts he would have…

So, when an editor resigns for something that is published in a journal, it’s because he’s “gutless”? There’s never a case of an editor resigning because he genuinely screwed up for letting a crappy paper slip past the peer-reveiw process thereby calling the integrity of the journal into question?
Ah.

This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this happen…

No, that won’t do. This is standard fare for deniers. It’s all about the headline and the “Help, help, we’re being oppressed!!”