Murdoch-owned media hypes lone metereologist’s climate junk science

[DonViejo]

By Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian
Friday, May 16, 2014 9:54 EDT

This morning I, like any of you, was disappointed to see that the frontpage of The Times carried a story by the paper’s environment editor, Ben Wester, which read, ‘Scientists in cover-up of “damaging” climate view.‘

Variations of the story had been plastered everywhere, spearheaded by Murdoch-owned outlets, repeated uncritically by others.

The Daily Mail, much loved for its objective reporting on climate change (and other stuff), declared: ‘Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in “McCarthy”-style witch-hunt by academics across the world.’

These stories were quoted approvingly by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto as “the latest reason to distrust the authority of ‘consensus’ climate scientists.”

But even a cursory glance reveals how thin these stories are.

The latest climate denialist outburst hinges on one man – Prof Lennart Bengtsson of the University of Reading. According to the Mail and The Times, a paper submitted by Bengtsson to Environmental Research Letters, was rejected by the journal not because it was bad science, but because of political “intolerance of dissenting views on climate science” among climate scientists.

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/16/murdoch-owned-media-hypes-lone-metereologists-climate-junk-science/

[gratuitous]

1. A friend posted the Bengtsson non-story on Facebook

I posted a response that I hope was an appropriate mix of disagreement with a dash of ridicule. Not a peep since then.

[GeorgeGist]

2. Trying to save the manchild Rubio?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. From the link giving the full review that rejected the paper:

Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side.

One cannot and should not simply interpret the IPCCs ranges for AR4 or 5 as confidence intervals or pdfs and hence they are not directly comparable to observation based intervals (as e.g. in Otto et al).

In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.

A careful, constructive, and comprehensive analysis of what these ranges mean, and how they come to be different, and what underlying problems these comparisons bring would indeed be a valuable contribution to the debate.

I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place.
And I can't see an honest attempt of constructive explanation in the manuscript.

http://ioppublishing.org/newsDetails/statement-from-iop-publishing-on-story-in-the-times

Shorter review: Bengtsson is a climate science troll.