Update: More on Climategate cooked books

AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, continues to gut the California economy.

Even after the 2009 revelations of Climategate showing that “climate scientists” cooked the books on the numbers.

Even after Climategate II in 2011.

Now we have Climategate III. James Delingpole reports:

Professor Lennart Bengtsson — the scientist at the heart of the “Climate McCarthyism” row — has hit back at his critics by accusing them of suppressing one of his studies for political reasons.

The paper, which Prof Bengtsson wrote with four co-authors, suggested that climate is probably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than is admitted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and that more research needs to be done to “reduce the underlying uncertainty”. However, when submitted for publication in the leading journal Environmental Research Letters, the paper failed the peer-review process and was rejected.

One of the peer-reviewers reportedly wrote:

‘It is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’

This, Prof Bengtsson told the Times, was “utterly unacceptable” and “an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views.”

He added:

‘The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist.’

In truth, to anyone familiar with the Climategate emails there will be nothing surprising or unusual in this incident or this claim. As the emails leaked in 2009 made abundantly clear, the organised suppression of sceptical papers in learned journals by the alarmist establishment has long been rife within the field of climate science.

What’s more significant is that this story has made it to the front page of the Times. Like most of the mainstream media, the Times has been remarkably slow to latch onto the corruption, malfeasance, waste, dishonesty, bullying and lies which are rife throughout the climate change industry. If it hadn’t been for the internet and sites like Watts Up With That? and blogposts like this one the Climategate scandal would have passed almost without notice.

Finally, it seems, the MSM is beginning to wake up to something it really ought to have picked up on long ago: the greatest and most expensive scientific scandal in history, in which a cabal of lavishly grant-funded, activist-scientists from Britain to Australia, Germany to the US, has exaggerated the evidence for “man-made global warming” and attempted ruthlessly to suppress the work of sceptical scientists who dispute the “consensus.”

Professor Bengtsson’s McCarthyite purging may one day come to be seen as the climate alarmists’ “Bridge Too Far” moment. As Judith Curry, climatologist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has argued, “It has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails.”

The reason, quite simply, is that it shows the climate change establishment in such an appalling light. These people have long traded on the public’s acceptance that they are the “experts”, the guys we can trust. Yet here they are shown behaving not like loftily-minded seekers-after-truth but simple playground bullies.

Will California now dump AB 32 into the trash can of history and restore our industrial economy, with great jobs for the middle-class, not just Silicon Valley geniuses? Will it bring back great manufacturing jobs to drop our poverty rate from the worst in the nation? Will it, perhaps, finally put behind it the narcissistic policies, including AB 32, of Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah.