Climate cancel culture: In 2024 special editor Marty Rowland published a paper explaining the climate skeptic viewpoint in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Something of an oxymoron, but never mind. The usual suspects howled that such views must not even be aired, not because there were errors in the paper but because climate skepticism is double-plus-ungood. The journal did not retract the paper, because the critics could not point to any factual issues. But it did fire the editor. So do not wonder why scientists and others working at public universities do not speak out against what they know to be inaccurate alarmist claims. Or why the public is losing faith in academia and “science”.
In case the guilty parties are still wondering whodunnit, we point to an item in E&E News “Climate critics try to discredit IPCC author for linking disasters to global warming” that hisses:
“Critics of mainstream climate science and allies of the fossil fuel industry are taking aim at a prominent expert who’s helping coordinate the next United Nations review of global climate research, arguing that her work aims to bolster multibillion-dollar lawsuits against oil and gas companies.”
The “prominent expert” being of course Friederike Otto, who goes to some lengths to explain that her work aims to bolster multibillion-dollar lawsuits against oil and gas companies. And the “critics” are Roger Pielke Jr. reincarnated as “a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute” as part of an inept smear job with a lot of boo hiss down with Trump. But Otto has boasted that her work was designed with litigation in mind and was happy to be praised for it. So are you now suddenly embarrassed at her brazen weaponization of science? And if so, why turn on those who pointed it out not those who did it?
Meanwhile the dreaded Roger Pielke Jr., actually a data-obsessed centrist at his own Substack “The Honest Broker”, highlights a dramatic drop in concern about climate among young Swedes, surely a bellwether group to experience such a thing since it includes Greta Thunberg. But at some point people get tired of being hectored even on the basis of sound information and solid predictions, let alone insulted by those with neither.
P.S. In this regard we have to mention a particular paper in Laboratory News “Putting knowledge before prestige” that argues that “Our reliance upon the impact factor is destroying public trust in science”. Including, we insist, the constant flow of highly implausible we-will-all-die-from-climate-change papers.
