MOSCOW, May 16 (RIA Novosti) – A UK climate change researcher said his paper questioning the speed of climate change was rejected because of intolerance of views seen as "skeptical," British media reported Friday.
“The problem we have now in the scientific community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of climate activist,” he told the Times. “It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views.”
Professor Lennart Bengtsson said he was forced to resign as a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s academic advisory council because of “enormous group pressure” which had become “unbearable.” He held this post for only about a month.
Bengtsson accused fellow scientists of deliberately rejecting publication that challenged findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global temperature would increase by 4.5C if greenhouse gases were to double.
A scientist advised that the paper said it should not be published in a respected Environmental Research Letters journal because it was “less than helpful.”
The scientific opponent, whose name was withheld, said in his comments: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate skeptics side.”
The journal’s publisher, IOP Publishing, said the reason for the rejection was that two independent reviewers found errors in the research, and that the work did not represent a “significant advancement in the field.”
“Far from hounding ‘dissenting’ views from the field, Environmental Research Letters positively encourages genuine scientific innovation that can shed light on complicated climate science,” Dr Nicola Gulley, editorial director, said.
