The blurb gives rise to at least the following counts of libel, given the widespread circulation of my name by the defendants on the list of those whom they describe as “deniers”, a term calculated to invite invidious comparison with Holocaust denial:
1. The defendants’ use of the word “denial” twice (once in the headline and once in the opening sentence of the blurb) – constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I and others on the list circulated by the defendants deny well-established scientific facts, when – as will be self-evident from the well-referenced paragraphs outlining the defendants’ frauds supra – my objections to the Party Line climate to which the defendants choose to adhere are not, as their adherence thereto is, merely political, but instead rigorously scientific.
2. The defendants’ use of the phrase “Sowing doubt” in a prominent subheading in the blurb constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I among others named on the list circulated by the defendants are adopting a political stance opposite to that of the defendants, and that we are dishonestly causing deliberate confusion in the public mind, when in fact my own work on climate, which includes numerous peer-reviewed publications in leading journals somehow not identified in the defendants’ careless purported “study”, raises genuine and profound scientific and economic concerns about the Party Line to which the defendants adhere.
3. The defendants’ use of the phrase “dubious or discredited assertions about global warming” in the blurb constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I among others named on the list circulated by the defendants are dishonestly attempting to mislead the public, and in its deliberately false implication that all of my published statements about the climate have been discredited. Let us take a single example: I am on record as having pointed out that, in control theory, the branch of engineering physics from which climatology borrows feedback method, such feedback processes as may subsist in a feedback-moderated dynamical system must perforce respond not only to any perturbations of the input signal but also to the entire reference signal, which is the sum of the input signal and any perturbations. However, it is not difficult to calculate that the 3.35 K official midrange estimate of Charney sensitivity in the CMIP5 models (Andrews op. cit.) is predicated on the assumption that, while the 10 K directly-forced or reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases is imagined to engender a 22.5 K feedback response (i.e., a response more than twice itself), the 274 K emission temperature that would be present in the absence of any greenhouse gases would engender a feedback response of zero. That is a large and self-evident but hitherto overlooked contradiction within the Party Line to which the defendants inexpertly adhere. Resolving that contradiction constrains Charney sensitivity to between 1 and 1.4 K – an interval entirely below the [1.5, 4.7] K interval currently imagined by IPCC and the CMIP5 models. The corrected warming, therefore, will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial. Even if it were the fact that official climatology’s “consensus” of “experts” had hitherto considered [1.5, 4.7] K to be a reasonable interval, the “consensus” would be incorrect and the experts – to that extent, at any rate, inexpert. The defendants have carelessly – and, in the event, libellously – assumed that the Party Line is in all respects correct, when in fact, in at least the respects outlined herein, it is demonstrably incorrect. The defendants’ libel is thus fundamentally dishonest and deliberately so, in that none of them has sufficient expertise in climatology or in any related subject to pronounce as they have pronounced to the effect that the Party Line must be in all material respects correct, and yet they have seen fit to pontificate in a fashion calculated deliberately to damage the reputations of those on the list they have carelessly circulated, including my name.
4. The defendants’ telling of the story of a Republican who had at first opposed the Party Line on climate and has now changed his mind was calculated, in association with the list of names including mine that the defendants had widely circulated, to convey the false impression that we too ought to confess our past sins and toe the Party Line to which they so faithfully and yet so inexpertly adhere, and to leave readers with the notion that it was only wilful dishonesty on our part that was leading us to make the allegedly “dubious” (but carefully unspecified) statements of which the defendants accused us in their prominently-circulated blurb.
The purported “study” contrasted “386 prominent contrarians” with “386 expert scientists”, and concluded that “professional mainstream sources” of news had been subjected to “crowding out” by –
“the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.”
The above passage constitutes libel of me as well as others named in the list circulated by the defendants, in that we are held to be guilty of deliberate “disinformation”. In fact, as the numerous references supra demonstrate, I have good scientific and economic reason to disagree with certain aspects of the Party Line to which the defendants adhere. What is more, the above passage constitutes evidence of malice, in that the defendants declare their determination to prevent those of us who have genuine scientific and economic doubts about the Party Line from gaining access to the news media in future. This and other evidences of malice on the part of the defendants, including the defendants’ circulation of the list of names including mine, removes the protection granted by Parliament to those who commit libels in “peer-reviewed” “studies”.
