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Revealed: How green zealots gagged professor who dared to question global warming
• Professor Lennart Bengtsson's study was rejected and branded 'harmful'
• This sparked accusations that scientists are censoring findings
• The 79-year-old is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists
• Last week, he resigned from the Global Warming Policy Foundation's advisory council
By David Rose
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Row: Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week
Ground-breaking climate research that was controversially ‘covered up’ suggests the rate that greenhouse gases are heating the Earth has been significantly exaggerated, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week when his study was rejected by a leading science journal after it was said to be ‘harmful’ and have a ‘negative impact’.
The rejection sparked accusations that scientists had crossed an important line by censoring findings that were not helpful to their views.
Prof Bengtsson further claims one of the world’s most recognised science publications also decided not to use his research findings, because, he said, they were considered to be ‘uninteresting’.
Prof Bengtsson’s critical paper was co-authored with four colleagues. It focused on the growing gap between real temperatures and predictions made by computers.
In a recent key report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated the ‘climate sensitivity’ – the amount the world will warm each time carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere double – was between 1.5C and 4.5C.
According to Prof Bengtsson’s paper, it is more likely to be 1.2C to 2.7C. The implications of the difference are huge. If the planet is warming half as fast as previously thought in response to emissions, many assumptions behind targets for reducing emissions and green energy subsidies are wrong.
The subsidies in turn have led to a significant increase in consumers’ power bills. Last week, it was revealed Environmental Research Letters had rejected his paper because it would be seized on by climate ‘sceptics’ in the media.
Established: The Global Warming Policy Foundation was set up by former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and is regarded as being part of the 'sceptic camp' when it comes to climate change. Later the journal said it had rejected the paper because the reviewers questioned the paper’s methods. But another journal turned it down without it even being sent out for peer review. Prof Bengtsson says this only normally happens if the editors believe the work is ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’.
Prof Bengtsson, 79, is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists. Last week he was forced to step down from the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the sceptical think-tank set up by Lord Lawson.
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He was accused by former friends and colleagues of ‘crossing into the deniers’ camp’.
Prof Bengtsson said the pressure was so great he had feared for his health. He said he had been stunned by the ‘emotional’ reaction to his joining the GWPF.
‘The way some in the climate community behaved shocked me,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had been married for many years, and then discovered my wife was a completely different person.’
Prof Bengtsson said the paper was now being considered by a third journal, after some revisions. But he had asked for his name to be to be removed in the wake of the row over the GWPF.
Is this the tipping point for climate McCarthyism?
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week.
If they do, they won’t mean that this was when global warming became unstoppable. Instead, they’ll be pointing to the curious affair of Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University as the moment that the rigid, authoritarian campaign to shut down debate on climate science and policy finally began to unravel.
For several years, this newspaper has been at the forefront of efforts to publicise the highly inconvenient truth that real world temperatures have not risen nearly as fast as computer models say they should have, thanks to the unexpected ‘pause’ in global warming which has so far lasted some 17 years. As Prof Bengtsson has now discovered, anyone who draws attention to this will be vilified and accused of ‘denying’ supposedly ‘settled’ science.
The dogma – the insistence, as Bengtsson put it yesterday, that ‘greenhouse gas emissions are leading us towards the end of the world in the not-too-distant future’ – dominates many aspects of our lives, from lessons taught in primary schools to the vast and rising ‘green’ energy subsidies on household fuel bills.
To be sure, Bengtsson’s treatment is not encouraging. As a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, he is one of the world’s most eminent experts.
Yet last week, he was accused of having joined the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan and the Flat Earth Society, and of peddling ‘junk science’ – all because he accepted a place on the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week
So great was the pressure, he feared for his health, and decided to resign. The most cursory look at the GWPF’s website makes clear it does not ‘deny’ any aspect of the science of global warming, nor that this has happened in response to human activity. Its focus (as its name rather suggests) is on policy, where it has indeed been critical of the approach thus far. But for the climate enforcers, that was enough. Bengtsson said: ‘I was labelled a heretic. I felt as if I was dealing with the medieval church.’
It also emerged that a paper he co-authored, arguing that temperatures would rise by only half as much as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims, had been rejected by a prestigious journal – after an anonymous reviewer said publishing it would be ‘harmful’ to the environmental cause, because it was bound to be reported by media sceptics.
Nevertheless, there are grounds for optimism. Perhaps it was simply that a man of Bengtsson’s stature who is still producing research at the age of 79 deserves respect, but the story was reported – not favourably, from the enforcers’ point of view – around the world. It even made the front page of The Times. Some of those who deplored the ‘climate McCarthyism’ that Bengtsson experienced, such as Prof Judith Curry of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, have received similar treatment for saying global warming may not pose the imminent threat so many want us to fear. Others, however, were from the very centre of the climate science mainstream, such as Prof Mike Hulme of King’s College, London. He condemned scientists who ‘harassed’ those with whom they disagreed until they ‘fall into line’. But if this really was a tipping point, it will be because the areas of uncertainty in climate science are simply too big to be ignored: claiming the debate is over does not make this true.
As former Nasa scientist Roy Spencer put it: ‘We might be seeing the death throes of alarmist climate science. They know they are on the ropes, and are pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to shore up their crumbling storyline.’
So here’s a question. Like Bengtsson, this newspaper believes global warming is real, and caused by CO2. It’s also clear that, thus far, the computer models have exaggerated its speed. So what exactly are we and others who hold such views denying?
