Topic: CNSNews.com
In a Dec. 18 CNSNews.com column, professional global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels asserts that the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit shows that climate scientists were "seriously manipulating the scientific literature that goes into the august IPCC scientific reports" and "blacklisting certain professional journals." He adds:
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying a voluminous scientific literature that didn't support Mann's claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium. Along with the CRU head Phil Jones and other climate luminaries, they then cooked up the idea of boycotting any scientific journal that dared publish anything by a few notorious "skeptics," myself included.
Their pressure worked. Editors resigned or were fired. Many colleagues began to complain to me that their good papers were either being rejected outright or subject to outrageous reviews — papers that would have been published with little revision just a few years ago.
In fact, as Media Matters detailed, the Climate Research paper in question -- a 2003 paper by Soon and Baliunas, which was underwritten by $53,000 from the American Petroleum Institute -- did have problems, and even the editors of the journal admitted that the paper's analysis was deeply flawed and should not have been published as written.
Further, regarding papers that emails by Penn State University scientist Michael Mann showed he expressed a desire to keep out consideration by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Michaels' viewthat Mann was successful in doing so is belied by the fact that at least some of those papers did make it into IPCC reports.
