Oops! The Climate Science Establishment did it again

It appears that a scientific paper challenging alarmist warming predictions has been suppressed because it was "unhelpful".  The Times of London reports:

Research which heaped doubt on the rate of global warming was deliberately suppressed by scientists because it was “less than helpful” to their cause, it was claimed last night.

(article behind a paywall but available here)

The lead author of this paper is Lennart Bengtsson.  It's important that you know his background:

He was Head of Research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts from 1975 to 1981 and then Director until 1990; then director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Environmental Systems Science Centre in the University of Reading.

In 2005 he was awarded the René Descartes Prize for Collaborative Research^[2] together with Prof. Ola M. Johannessen and Dr. Leonid Bobylev from the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre in Norway and Russia for the Climate and Environmental Change in the Arctic project. In 2006 he was awarded the 51st IMO prize of the World Meteorological Organization for pioneering research in numerical weather prediction.^[3]

So you have a distinguished (award winning) scientist who specializes in the area of climate sensitivity, writing a paper on climate sensitivity.  The paper gets spiked in suspicious circumstances.  He was also pressured to resign from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a skeptic think tank.  Judith Curry (chair of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Science) writes:

... I deeply regret that any scientist, particularly such a distinguished scientist as Bengsston, has had to put up with these attacks.  This past week, we have seen numerous important and enlightening statements made by Bengtsson about the state of climate science and policy, and science and society is richer for this.  We have also seen a disgraceful display of Climate McCarthyism by climate scientists, which has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails.

Bengtsson is no nutter; on the contrary, he is a scientist of considerable standing and reputation.  And yet not only is his science suppressed, he is suppressed by the Climate Science Establishment.  The Times captures the situation perfectly in its front page report:

Oops, they did it again.  Remember "hide the decline"?



I will post more about this, because this is a very big climate story.  It's big because of the suppression of "unhelpful" science.  It's big because of the suppression of scientists who deviate from received orthodoxy - just as in the Climategate emails saying that they would redefine how peer-review works.

As with Watergate, it's not the crime, it's the cover up.  Something is rotten in the state of Climate Science, and the stench is making its way to the very front page.  They won't be able to hide the decline in the public's respect for Climate Science.