Given the issues raised by the Nature Communications blacklist fiasco last week, I thought it might be useful to show readers who don’t work in science an example of the kind of not-so-subtle dissuasion that can be used by “scientists with a climate message” to keep their colleagues in line.
A male colleague I know from work in another field of biology recently sent me a cordial email that I’m sure he thought was simply helpful advice to a like-minded associate. I doubt he realized how outrageously patronizing and presumptuous he was being.
If I were a female scientist with less confidence and experience, a note like this might have intimidated me into silence.
The fact that he thought it was an appropriate thing to do is one of the reasons we have such a problem in science right now.
See what you think:
Dear Susan,
An item in your polar bear science blog is apparently being used by an alt-right twitter handle to promote the idea of a lack of global warming, called @uk_ecology
I follow some Brexiteers, so twitter helpfully sends me climate denial info too. They seem to align, politically speaking!
I checked your blog, and as far as I could tell, you’re not promoting an agenda against climate science, as you admit that global warming is happening and you show nice graphs of it.
As far as I could tell from a quick browse, you’re actually just saying that polar bears are actually doing ok, at least so far. And you refuse to make any predictions about what will happen if the polar ice cap is really strongly reduced.
Unfortunately, I’m not up on polar bear population ecology. So I can’t exactly tell whether you are really dedicated to factual reporting about the polar bear, or whether you do really have a sort of agenda to tell people it’s ok to burn more fossil fuels.
I’d like to direct you to the relevant tweet that I think you can access by simply clicking on a link without being on twitter:
Unusually thick first year ice in the Arctic makes several ships turn back this summer. Polar bear numbers continue to rise but the #ClimateCult gets crazier.
— EcologySenseUK (@uk_ecology) July 30, 2019
If your aim is not to feed this denial agenda that everything’s ok with the climate, and you believe at all that it might be bad for polar bears, you might like to choose words more carefully, especially for headlines, which might be the only thing people read.
Best wishes, Jxx
Feel free to contact me by email.
Dr. Susan Crockford is a University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) zoologist who specializes in Holocene mammals, including polar bears and walrus. Her new book is The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Amazon).
Read more at Polar Bear Science
What this whole episode points out in shocking detail is A, how unprincipled the kind of people are who have come to infest academia on both sides of the Pond and B, what they will do to you without a moment’s hesitation thought IF they think you can do or say something which will expose the big fat nothing which underpins their miserable existence. A trend I notice which has crept into the Climate Industry pseudo-science world. This is producing papers with 20+ authors not doing any original research at all but just based on word searches and minimal reading in “selective” bibliographies. To call this quasi librarianship scientific research is like looking for the good side to Hitler! From the get go the intention is to deliberately distort because they select only papers saying what they want without even bothering to see if there is any empirical data supporting those assertions! A crime against humanity and civilization!
Aside from the two fraudulent studies that claim 97% consensus among scientists on climate change, the fact that there appears to be considerable support for the climate change dogma is often used to by the left in an effort to substantiate their claims. This article shows why some of that support exists. Of course, a big factor is researcher prostituting themselves for grant money. Pressure on scientists to conform is every where. When the graduate student who dug up the data that showed the ocean acidification report was a fraud was working on the effort, he was told if he continued he wouldn’t go far in his career.
Face it the Eco-Nazis/watermelons want to silence all skeptics of this Global Warming/Climate Change scam it all has to do with Money and Politics and the political agendas of the various Eco-Freaks leaders and the useful idiots who take part in idiotic protests
It looks as if Jxx is the one promoting a political agenda.
As usual with “lefties”, they accuse, or infer, that you, are guilty of the very things that THEY are guilty of averring.