Links tagged “Michael Mann”

Pielke Jr.: A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled “climate misinformers.” The list includes 17 academics and is intended as a blacklist. We know of this intent because one of the principals of Skeptical Science, a blogger named Dana Nuccitelli, said so last Friday, writing of one academic on their list, “if you look at the statements we cataloged and debunked on her [Skeptical Science] page, it should make her unhirable in academia.”

That so-called “unhirable” academic is Professor Judy Curry, formerly the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. By any conventional academic metric, Curry has compiled an impressive record over many decades. The idea that she would be unhirable would seem laughable.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing an executive order that would make it easier for everyone to access publicly funded research. According to E&E News, the White House is considering mandating, via executive order, that all federally funded research be immediately available to the public upon publication. Currently, a lot of federally funded research is kept behind a paywall for one year before it becomes public. The executive order would reportedly mandate eliminating that paywall period...

But if what’s reported is broadly true, this could be a big win for a movement known as Open Science, which has complained that for too long, taxpayer-funded research has been locked behind expensive paywalls, keeping it out of reach for the people who paid for it...

Publishers, however, are not pleased. On Wednesday, more than 125 scientific publishers of scientific journals (including the behemoth Elsevier, as well as Wiley) and large scientific organizations (like the Association for Psychological Science and the American Geophysical Union, which also publish journals) co-signed a letter condemning the potential executive order. Other notable signatories include the American Heart Association and the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the letter, they write that the executive order would “would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals” and that the move would “effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free.”

Jem Bendell, a former consultant to the United Nations and longtime Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria’s Department of Business, delivered a paper in May 2019 explaining how people and communities might “adapt to climate-induced disruption.” Bendell’s thesis is not only that societal collapse due to climate change is on its way, but that it is, in effect, already here.

But climate activist scientists disagreed. 

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies replied: “The evidence for ‘inevitable societal collapse’ is very weak to non-existent.”

Dr. Michael Mann: “To me, this paper is a perfect storm of misguidedness and wrongheadedness."