That will teach him to commit heresy:
On May 8, Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish climate scientist and meteorologist, joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group that questions the reliability of climate change and the costs of policies taken to address it. While Bengtsson maintains he’d always been a skeptic as any scientist ought to be, the foundation and climate-change skeptics proudly announced it as a defection from the scientific consensus.
Less than a week later, he says he’s been forced to resign from the group.
Wrote Bengtsson in his resignation letter:
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expect[ed] such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life.
He compared his treatment to McCarthyism. But he's off by several centuries. This is a religious war. And you either believe or you are a heretic.
But to be fair to Bengtsson, nobody expects the Warmish Inquisition.
UPDATE: More on the issue:
Especially significant was a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute, who for many years worked alongside James Hansen. “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community,” Schmidt tweeted. “Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”
Evidently the right to practice and discuss climate science should be subject to a faith test. It is an extraordinarily revealing development. Fears about unbelievers’ polluting the discourse, as some academics put it, illustrate the weakness of climate science: The evidence for harmful anthropogenic global warming is not strong enough to stand up for itself.
Yes. Bad "faith." The word choice reveals much, I think. So don't call this a new McCarthyism as the article styles it. This is a matter of faith.
Now go and emit no more.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn, of course, expected the inquisition, and notes that the consensus apparatchiki are still (even apart from his own case) suppressing dissent:
In other words, despite Climategate, despite the Oxburgh inquiry and the Russell inquiry and the NOAA inquiry and all the rest, nothing has changed. With hindsight, Rand Simberg's comparison of Penn State's joke investigations into Jerry Sandusky and Michael Mann missed the most obvious point of similarity: The more Penn State bent over backwards to look the other way, the more Sandusky took it as a nod and a wink to carry on as usual. The Clime Syndicate seems to have reacted to the Climategate investigations in exactly the same way.
I suspect when the Mann suit is over, Mann will have recanted and converted.
Oh, and a bonus exploration of how a global warming "scientist" describes temperature rises in percent rather than degrees Celsius. Which means the problem decreases if you use the Fahrenheit scale and becomes virtually nothing if you go Kelvin. Ah, science. No word of how many carbon atoms can fit on the head of a pin, however.
