The journal Nature previously enjoyed great prestige among science journals.
In recent years, however, Nature‘s editors have heavily promoted climate doomsday messaging.
Now the journal has published a study purporting to show that climate change “contrarians” are overrepresented in media discussions of climate science.
The study first gathered a large list of known “contrarians” taken from anti-skeptic websites such as Desmogblog.com. This list included a number of celebrity non-scientist commentators such as Mark Steyn and Marc Morano.
Then the study trashes the contrarians as (generally) undercredentialled–and then compares the contrarians’ alleged media popularity with that of another list of recognized ‘consensus’-repeating university climate scientists.
The ‘study’ concludes that ‘contrarians’ tend to get attention and coverage vastly greater than they deserve.
The clear message behind the study is that observers and journalists should endeavor to ignore, marginalize or blacklist those voices on the contrarian list.
A number of scholars have already debunked the study. Contrarians are already suppressed in most mainstream venues.
Another scholar looked into the data sources behind the study and found many to be missing or nonexistent. Moreover, much of the commentary about those on the contrarian list is quite negative. See here.
And the list of ‘climate consensus’ names (which supposedly shows that highly-credentialed scientists are being suppressed under the media notoriety of contrarians) does not include noteworthy nonscientist celebrities such as Al Gore or Leonardo DiCraprio.
