The following appeared this week in a Nature Communications article entitled
Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility
of climate change scientists and contrarians :
Understanding Earth’s coupled human–environmental systems requires broad and deep knowledge of processes occurring across a range of scales—from microscopic chemical processes to macroscopic thermodynamic flows and human consumption and land-use trends that span the entire global system52. The monumental task of drawing together and integrating expertise across numerous research domains will require intense trust-based collaboration across disciplinary, organizational, and political boundaries35. To this end, the consortium science framework53—whereby teams of teams organize around a common goal, with a mission to share returns both within and beyond organizational boundaries—is an appropriate model for facilitating cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange and achieving the transformative breakthroughs needed to address this grand challenge. We see this collaborative pattern in the structure of citations within the broader Climate Change Science community documented here (Fig. 7), but not within the Climate Change Contrarian community, which is too small to encompass the complexity required to grapple with the fundamental issues of CC science.
Fraud, breach of right of privacy and libel by Nature Communications @NatureComms
Elisa de Ranieri, editor-in-chief, Nature Communications,
David Gevaux, chief “physical-sciences” editor, Fiona Gillespie, managing editor, Jasper Franke, associate editor,“Earth team”, Alexander Michael Petersen, asst. professor, engineering, Emmanuel M. Vincent, “climate communications”, Anthony LeRoy Westerling
15 August 2019
Mesdames, gentlemen,
Fraud, breach of right of privacy and libel by Nature Communications
My attention has been drawn to a purported “peer-reviewed” “research” “study” for which the addressees hereof are jointly and severally responsible. Publication of the purported “study”, actively and widely marketed on the homepage of Nature Communications as well as on the co-authors’ websites and curricula vitae, is unlawful at criminal as well as at civil law.
The journal, its editors names supra and the three authors of the purported “study” are guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud by misrepresentation and by abuse of public trust on multiple counts evidenced later herein.
Unless within seven days I shall have received from each of the addressees a written apology for their role in the fraud and an undertaking that the offending “study” has been removed permanently from all forms of circulation and will not be reissued under any circumstances or in any form, I shall report the fraud to the Serious Fraud Office, to the Chief Constable of South Gloucestershire, and to Interpol, and shall request that the addressees hereof be added to the list of those under investigation for scientific and financial fraud in connection with the systemic and profitable international over-promotion of the imagined problem of “global warming”.
The said defendants are guilty of breach of my right to privacy in terms of Art. 8, European Human Rights Convention in their widespread circulation without having obtained or even sought my consent (which is for the avoidance of doubt withheld) of a list, including my name, of those described on the Nature Communications homepage as “climate deniers” and in the offending “study” variously as “denialists”, “contrarians” and other derogatory terms calculated in context to lead readers to hold me in hatred, ridicule and contempt. I require within seven days a written undertaking from each addressee that the list will not be further circulated, that each addressee will at once contact all those into whose hands he or she has allowed it to fall and instruct them to destroy the list and to pass on the instruction to all to whom they may have distributed it...
... what purports to be a “peer-reviewed” “research” “study” but is in reality a party political broadcast for the defendants’ extremist, totalitarian viewpoint – that journalists and editors should censor what is, in the journals, the majority view to the effect that we cannot be sure that global warming is chiefly anthropogenic. The fact that that is the majority view, even though journals such as the Nature group have done their malevolent worst only to reflect the defendants’ Party Line in their pages, shows just how little true “consensus” there really is. Indeed, the notion that totalitarians should peddle the idea that there is a consensus, that the debate is over and that the West must be made to suffer for its imagined “climate debt” was first promulgated by a Communist front group in the United Kingdom in 2006...
Here, the defendants recite yet again what that Communist front group proclaimed as the Party Line well over a decade ago: the science is settled (when the defendants know it is not); the consensus is near-unanimous (when the defendants know that it is limited only to the question what fraction of global warming is anthropogenic, and that on that question the defendants are in a tiny, insignificant majority that they are fraudulently presenting as though it were an “overwhelming” majority); and we must act (when in fact we must not act, for if we act we cause needless economic and environmental damage).
With good reason, then, I reiterate the requests set forth at the beginning of this letter. I shall expect answers from each defendant within seven days of the date of this letter.
Yours faithfully,
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
