Take this week’s climate prat of the week, Professor Jonathan Butterworth of the Physics and Astronomy Department at University College London.
Butterworth has just been caught red-handed trying to prevent one of his colleagues holding a conference for climate sceptics because, in his opinion, their views are “rather fringe.”
Here is the snooty email he sent to his colleague Dr Athem Alsabti, former Professor of Physics at Baghdad University, now working at UCL’s Observatory:
“It has been brought to my attention that you have booked a room at University College, London, for an external conference in September for a rather fringe group discussing aspects of climate science.
“If this event were to go ahead at UCL, it would generate a great deal of strong feeling, indeed it already has, as members of the UCL community are expressing concern to me that we are giving a platform to speakers who deny anthropogenic climate change while flying in the face of accepted scientific methods. I am sure you have no desire to bring UCL into disrepute, or to cause dissension in the UCL community, and I would encourage you to think about moving the event to a different venue, not on UCL premises.”
The conference – which is still going ahead, though not now in the university itself but at a nearby venue, Conway Hall – will feature a number of scientists every bit as distinguished in their field as Butterworth presumably is in his.
According to Lord Monckton, who is organising it, they include:
Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, who has published more refereed papers on sea-level rise than Professor Butterworth has had hot dinners; Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo, who publishes a widely-circulated monthly data update on global temperatures and related matters; Professor Jan-Erik Solheim of Norway; members of the Swedish Polar Institute, of the Asociacion Rural de Paraguay; of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, of the U.S. Geological Survey; of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the former president of the Italian National Research Council; the Professor of Paleobotany at the Sapienza University, Rome; a world-leading physicist from the François Rabelais University in Tours; an analytical expert from the Laboratoire Analyse at the University of Paris; the brother of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in the House of Commons; dozens of doctors of science; and a sprinkling of IPCC expert reviewers, including your humble servant.
Butterworth may think he knows better on climate than these experts, though how is not immediately clear given that it’s not his field. And while he’s perfectly entitled to his random, unsupported, prejudiced, haughty, third-hand, groupthink-induced opinions, what’s baffling is his decision to invoke in his own support the principle of the “scientific method”. (Or “methods” as he mysteriously chooses to pluralise it in his email to Alsbati.)
It must be really annoying for a physics professor to be told by an English literature graduate that he doesn’t understand the scientific method. But since what he’s doing here is the rough equivalent of an English literature undergraduate not knowing who wrote Hamlet, I fear I may have to take the risk of bruising his inflated ego.
Read the rest at Breitbart.