Wunsch on Nature
May 4, 2012
Bishop Hill in Journals

This from a reader:

I saw a talk by Carl Wunsch at Wolfson College, Oxford this evening.  He's probably best known outside of his field (oceanography) for disagreeing with how his views were represented in "The Great Global Swindle".  He's somewhat equivocal on the certainty of AGW, maintaining that anyone who claims to be able to forecast the climate even a decade or two ahead doesn't know what they're talking about.  Of course that cuts both ways so "deniers" (he included the quotation marks) can take no comfort in such ignorance and certainly not use it as the basis for inaction.  He's broadly in favour of precautionary measures.

Anyway, that was fairly general ho-hum.  The money-quotes came late on when he talked about "the Nature-Science problem".  He seemed faintly disgusted by the lengths to which some climate scientists will go to get published in Nature or Science with the attendant publicity, media appearances and so on.  He sometimes found it difficult to tell which of the Daily Mail and Nature was the peer-reviewed journal and which the tabloid.  Nonetheless, he said, his colleagues  reassure him that just because something appears in Nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.

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