Climate McCarthyism Strikes Again

Posted on September 4, 2011
by Steven Hayward at powerlineblog.com

About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.”  Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior.  (This issue is closely related, though not identical, to the post I had up last weekend on Nature’s blockbuster cosmic ray paper.)  As Spencer explains on his blog: “Even the IPCC admits the biggest uncertainty in how much human-caused climate change we will see is the degree to which cloud feedback [temperature change => cloud change] will magnify (or reduce) the weak direct warming tendency from more CO2 in the atmosphere.”
Well, you can imagine what happened next.  Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing.  Better still, they seem to have given him the full Rubashov treatment and forced a confession:

Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell… is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.
“Should not have been published.”  Even though it passed peer review, and finds lots of company among scientists and other journal articles.  And besides, if it’s been attacked on the internet by the climate mafia, then it must be wrong!
You can understand why the Climate McCarthyites want to suppress Dr. Spencer.  He’s only been a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA for more than a decade, co-designer of NASA’s satellites that monitor global temperatures, winner of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and author of several books on the subject, including Climate Confusion, and The Great Global Warming Blunder.