Censorship of climate sceptics

There are no climate scientists who are sceptical of AGW, have you noticed?

It's interesting in this report as in all the reportage of climate change, those scientists of any stripe who believe in AGW are referred to as "climate scientists", and those scientists of any type who don't support the AGW theory are referred to, not as climate scientists, but as climate sceptics, or just plain sceptics.

As Sumner Miller used to say, "Why is it so?"

MARK COLVIN: The credibility of research and science often comes down to whether or not a paper is peer reviewed and published. But even when the research does go to print, there's still intense and often complicated discussion to be had.

The latest debate on climate science to emerge centres on a paper which suggests humans played no role in the recent warming trend. Instead, it says El Nino activity is to blame.

A group of climate scientists say that's false, misleading and that the data's been manipulated by climate deniers. They've now had their rebuttal published.

But the authors of the initial report say they wanted to respond, but their attempt was rejected.

Environment reporter Sarah Clarke.

As to the content of the report, are we really surprised? The accusations of cooking and/or cherry picking the data sound strangely familiar...

SARAH CLARKE: Kevin Trenberth and a group of seven scientist have now responded in a paper to be published in the same journal. It describes John McLean's theory and calculations as misleading and seriously in error on the grounds the figures he says were overstated and the El Nino activity alone can't explain the recent trends on longer time scales.

And he says he's not surprised that John McLean's paper's since been embraced by climate change deniers.

KEVIN TRENBERTH: Well, this is of course a part of the campaign of a number of these so called deniers of, of climate change that, oh there's no global warming due to humans, it's all due to natural variability. And so this paper has gotten a lot of attention because it seemed to demonstrate that but in fact it really didn't.

And unfortunately this other paper was then used by the, the climate change deniers as a, a means of discrediting global warming. And it's that misuse which is rather disturbing here,

Now I think we've, we've set the record straight. You know, there is natural variability we've seen it in spades in the last year or two in fact but it doesn't remove the fact that there is global warming going on. In the longer term we need to be very concerned about global climate change.

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