The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.
No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.
After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming†scare  driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends  has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe.
You won’t have seen much about these riots in the Western news media: they are too busy reporting on every putative icicle putatively dribbling in putatively melting Greenland.
Where was Nature when James Hansen  a publicly funded “scientist†and political agitator “working†for NASA  publicly demanded that anyone who disagreed with his climate-extremist views be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity�
Did Nature write a pompous, pietistic editorial drawing attention to the fact that the penalty for crimes against humanity is death, and asking whether demands that one’s scientific opponents should face potential execution constitute an appropriate contribution to scientific discourse? Did it heck! Nature was sullenly, culpably silent.
Hansen wrote a characteristically overblown op-ed in the British Marxist newspaper the Guardian last year, saying that sea level was about to rise by 246 feet.
Should I face trial and execution for pointing out, mildly, that Hansen knows no more about sea-level rise than a hedgehog, and that even the excitable UN climate panel puts 21st-century sea-level rise at a maximum of 2 feet?
Where was Nature when Al Gore’s mawkish, sci-fi, comedy-horror movie came out? Did it ever disclose even one of the three dozen serious errors or exaggerations in that dismal piece of pseudo-scientific propaganda? Did it heck! Gore’s climate-extremist views chimed with Nature’s own, so its editors were sullenly, culpably silent.
Where was Nature when the UN’s climate panel published, three times and in full color, a graph in its 2007 report purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 160 years has itself increased, allegedly because of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, when the graph deployed a statistical technique so bogus that any pimply freshman doing Stats 101 would recognize the graph as tendentious, politicized nonsense?
Nowhere, that’s where.
The mindless mantra that moaning ninnies like Nature mumble over and over again is that, notwithstanding one, or several, or hundreds, or thousands of bloopers in the now-discredited climate “assessments†of the UN’s climate panel, the science is settled and the debate is over. Yet the debate rages on and  tell it not in Gath or Ashkelon  the skeptics are winning.
Nature’s editors, not having reached intellectual puberty, lack the self-critical skill of examining their own consciences. When they grow up, they will realize that there is a reason why the skeptics are winning. It is because the skeptics are right. The science never was settled, nor was the debate over. CO2 is a bit-part player in the climate. Get over it and move along. Get a life.
And how come the skeptics are winning, when billions of state-funded propaganda dollars have been squandered for decades in an ever more futile attempt to buy the acquiescence of John Q. Public? Your average voter does not necessarily understand the growing number of scientific papers establishing, by a variety of measurements, that the UN’s XBox 360s have gotten the models wrong, and that the warming effect of CO2 is around one-seventh of the UN’s vastly-exaggerated central estimate.
But what the man on the crosstown bus can smell a mile off is propaganda bulls***. Tell him the debate on anything is over and his antennae will start to twitch. Tell him that because the debate is over he will have to lose his job and pay higher taxes and gasoline prices and electricity costs and he will ask what you’re on and whether he can have some.
The sheer shrillness of the true-believers, such as Nature’s zit-bespattered editors, has woken up the sleeping giant of public opinion, and the giant will not go back to sleep however often Nature maunders on about the fundamental science being agreed among all parties. After 15 years with no statistically significant “global warming†(Nature didn’t tell you that), nine years of a rapid global cooling trend (Nature forgot to mention it), sea level growing at just 1 foot per century (Nature didn’t get around to reporting that), and sea ice showing no global trend in 30 years (Nature somehow missed that one), no one is believing the true-believers any more.
I know: let’s put Nature’s editors on trial for high crimes against journalistic integrity and scientific truth. Death is far too good for them: let us condemn them to reading out their own editorials to each other until they realize how silly they are, or for all eternity, whichever be the sooner.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a British politician, business consultant, and policy advisor.
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