To the Institute of Physics, United Kingdom:
I am an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and a co-organizer of a Petition drive to the APS Council to modify or withdraw the published APS Statement on Climate Change [see Nature 460:457, 23 July 2009]. Some 250 members and Fellows of the APS have now joined in signing this Petition, including members of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Nobelist, and many other prize winners.
I urge you to ignore all of the insubstantial criticisms leveled against your submission to the House of Commons’ inquiry into ClimateGate. All scientists should applaud your call for openness and sharing of data – even without the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, and regardless of one’s position on the causes of global warming. To echo Margaret Thatcher’s admonition to President George Bush: “Don’t go wobbly!”
It is strange that such fierce criticism of the IOP submission has come mainly from avowed promoters of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) myth, who have attacked the IOP as “misinformed and misguided.” (Some have even advocated breaking the law by ignoring the “Freedom of Information Act.”) But why should there be any connection between the sharing of scientific information and the cause of GW?
Your submission criticized the practices of the climate scientists at the center of the Parliamentary inquiry. These include primarily Dr Philip Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Dr Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. The submission of the Royal Society of Chemistry says “that a lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods used are not robust enough to face scrutiny.” So what are they trying to hide? We have yet to discover just how Jones et al managed to produce a substantial surface warming [between 1979 and 1997] when satellites showed practically no tropospheric warming – a disparity which is in conflict with every greenhouse climate model.
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