Back to Books Burning and Inquisition

The sudden closure of the new scientific journal Pattern Recognition in Physics (PRP) by its publisher Copernicus because the first special edition expressed skepticism to CO2 climate alarmism, has sent a shock wave through the scientific blogosphere, see here, here and here.

Distinguished Swedish scientist Prof. Nils-Axel Mörner, the former head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University, and the PRP special edition journal editor, has issued a statement:

• By this decision, we were suddenly thrown back in the evolution of humanism and culture to the stage of inquisition and books burning.
• To debate is a vital part of science. To forbid and even close down a journal because of an inevitable conclusion which “sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC” is most unscientific and unethical.
• Copernicus has disgraced itself in this desperate act of trying to cover up for IPCC.

Myself, I was thrown back to this stage already in 2010, when my math book Mathematical Simulation Technology (link also in left blog column) containing some simple mathematical models of global climate, was burned in KTH-gate, with a sequel in KTH-gate2 in 2012 and KTH-gate3 initiated in 2013 leading to a decision in the Supreme Court putting an end to a basic principle of Swedish democracy of giving people right to access information at public institutions.

In this situation, there is still hope because the blogosphere is not yet closed down...Science, institutions and courts and can be steered by politics even in democratic systems, but the blogosphere can only be controled in a totalitarian system. And it was independent minds of the blogosphere who discovered the hollowness of CO2 alarmism threatening to throw back society to pre-industrial misery and Malthusian limits.