Leading voices in the climate community are in an uproar as their warming hypothesis comes under fresh assault by new scientific papers.
The authors of the papers are being attacked and say that “activist scientists” threatened by the new findings are “aggressively conducting an orchestrated disinformation campaign to discredit the papers and the scientific reputation of the authors.”
Indeed, from insults on social media and furious blog posts to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding emails from a journal editor and federal scientist, the controversy is getting heated.
Several scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed shock at the tactics used against those whose latest research is casting renewed doubts on the official climate narrative.
William Happer, Princeton professor emeritus of physics and former climate adviser to President Donald Trump, wasn't surprised by the response to the new findings.
“Of course the climate cult will be dismissive of any information—no matter how scientifically correct—that is politically incorrect," he told The Epoch Times, noting that the new findings made important and valid points.
The reason that climate activists are so upset is that the findings of the new papers—a trio of peer-reviewed studies by astrophysicist Willie Soon and dozens of other scientists from around the world—are casting further doubt on the narrative of man-made global warming.
The papers are also fueling even more public skepticism about the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the authors say ignores the facts as well as climate science more generally.
The rhetoric employed by taxpayer-funded scientists with a vested interest in the climate change narrative to attack the new research was profoundly unscientific, multiple scientists told The Epoch Times.
Atmospheric science professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, for instance, denounced the authors of one of the new papers as “a group of climate denier [clown emoji]” on X.
Mr. Mann, famous for the now-widely ridiculed “hockey stick” graph purporting to show massive man-made warming, also described the editor of the journal Climate as a “denier clown.”
Gareth S. Jones with the UK Met Office ridiculed the new studies as "nonsense," while smearing the journal publisher for supposedly being "popular with the science denial community."
Mr. Jones also denounced the guest editor of Climate’s special issue, Ned Nikolov, for having a "bit of a reputation, so much so that other climate contrarians distance themselves from him."
Mr. Nikolov authored an earlier paper arguing that atmospheric pressure, not greenhouse gases, plays a primary role in temperatures on Earth and on other celestial bodies.
Also chiming in to attack the new papers and the scientists behind them was Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who's using a FOIA request to demand all of Mr. Nikolov’s emails with relevant scientists.
Mr. Schmidt mocked Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, one of the authors, saying on X that there was “mo[o]re [expletive] going around” before posting a highly edited version of Mr. Moore’s post on social media.
“The only point of this paper (which every climate denier and their dog has jumped onto), is to launder dirty ‘science’ into a clean made-for-Fox meme,” Mr. Schmidt wrote on X before publishing a more detailed rebuttal on his blog Real Climate.
“The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old ‘it was the sun wot done it’ trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades,” argued Mr. Schmidt, whose federal salary is almost $200,000 per year. “There is literally nothing new under the sun.”
Scientists Respond
The blog post by Mr. Schmidt “is dismissive in an insubstantive way,” said climatologist Judith Curry, who wasn't involved in the new papers but previously served as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“The response by Schmidt, Mann, and others, particularly with regard to the FOIA request regarding editorial discussions on this paper, reflects their ongoing attempts to control the scientific as well as public dialogue on climate change,” she told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, their behavior not only reflects poorly on them but is damaging to climate science.”
Ms. Curry, author of "Climate Uncertainty and Risk," who has a post by the lead authors on her blog Climate Etc. to provide a forum for discussion, said the new paper raises “an important issue that is swept under the rug by the IPCC and many climate scientists.”
In particular, it has major implications for how 20th-century climate records are interpreted, she said.
“Further, the issue of the urban heat island effect on global land temperatures remains unresolved, which is also highlighted in the Soon et al. paper,” she said, calling it “a useful contribution to the climate science literature.”
Mr. Soon, the main author of the paper and a principal with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), explained that the three new papers by CERES scientists are a major threat to powerful vested interests.
“For over three decades, the claims and conclusions by U.N. IPCC reports reigned supreme, unquestioned and unchallenged,” Mr. Soon, who was previously with the solar and stellar physics division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Epoch Times. “Our latest series of three published papers show that those claims are scientifically empty.
“Our results appear to rock the weak foundation of IPCC, and this must be the reason why you are seeing such instantaneous rejection and outright complaining by activists like Schmidt and Mann.”
Mr. Soon and some of the other scientists involved in the new papers published another groundbreaking study in 2021 showing that solar activity could explain all observed warming.
In a highly unusual development for complex scientific studies, that paper has been downloaded more than 55,000 times since it was published.
“The high level of attention to this paper by people hungry for truth might be the real threats that Schmidt and Mann are worrying about,” Mr. Soon said, pointing to a detailed response to the attacks from critics published on CERES-Science.com, titled "The orchestrated disinformation campaign by RealClimate.org to falsely discredit and censor our work."
Mr. Happer noted that the new paper by Mr. Soon and the other authors, headlined “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming,” is indeed significant.
The two important and valid points are that there are “huge uncertainties” surrounding how much warming there has been since 1850 and how much of that might be due to human activities, he said.
“The paper presents very strong evidence that a warming bias is built into the records from urban areas,” Mr. Happer told The Epoch Times after reviewing the paper, which he wasn't involved with.
“This extra warming of urban versus rural areas is not caused by increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It is caused by humans, but it cannot be reversed by ruinous net-zero policies.”
Mr. Happer, who believes that human CO2 emissions are responsible for “a relatively small contribution” to the “modest warming” that has been observed, agreed with the paper’s conclusion that available data isn't good enough to determine how significant the various factors, such as volcanoes, solar irradiance, and greenhouse gas emissions, are to the warming.
Marc Morano, editor of the popular website Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times that the aggressive reaction to the new papers was an effort to silence dissent from the U.N.-backed narrative.
“The climate establishment is mimicking the same coercive tactics that we saw in COVID,” he said. “If you present any scientific challenge to the official narrative, you are the deplatformed, canceled, censored, and silenced.”
Indeed, the United Nations and other powerful groups are actively working to silence other views on the issue. U.N. Undersecretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is waging war on what she calls climate “disinformation.”
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