Everyone agrees that global warming is real and that unless we do something soon our descendents will experience radical climate change that will destroy human civilization and send us back to the stone age, right?

Not quite:

Two of the world’s leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.

A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds

A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.

The controversy has erupted over an article published in Science Magazine by Dr Naomi Oreskes that purports to show almost universal agreement among climatologists over global warming being a genuine phenomenom and that mankind is indeed to blame.

Unfortunately for Dr. Oreskes, she um, didn’t quite tell the truth:

However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication – but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he makes had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.

Dr. Peiser thought that Science should publish the paper anyway. “As the results from my analysis refuted the original claims, I believe Science has a duty to publish them.”

This isn’t the only instance of global warming dissenters being shut out of legitimate scientific debate. Via Little Green Footballs we get this remarkable story from Canada. It seems that a group of scientists have made a documentary debunking global warming but are unable to get the show aired in Canada:

The numbers of scientists staggered me—17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two thirds with advanced degrees, are against the Kyoto Agreement. The Heidelberg Appeal—which states that there is no scientific evidence for man-made global warming, has been signed by over 4,000 scientists from around the world since the petition’s inception. I strongly questioned these high numbers, since I’ve had benefit of the Canadian government’s public relations machine on this issue. Dr. Leahey has since sent documentation to back his figures up.

All those scientists were in total agreement: the Kyoto Protocol was complete fiction.

The forces arrayed against dissenters are formidable. What’s at stake are hundreds of millions of dollars – perhaps billions – in research grants from governments and various NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) who have a vested interest in seeing the Kyoto Accords ratified by the world’s scientific community. With that kind of money floating around as well as the reputation and prestige of scientists on the line who’ve gone out on a limb to endorse the theory, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that dissenters are having trouble getting their viewpoints before the public and hence policy makers.

The third world has a huge stake in Kyoto in that they are not only immune from its requirements, they will be able to profit from the agreement because they will be able to “sell” emission credits to industrialized countries that can’t meet Kyoto’s stringent standards. Since the US has the farthest to go to meet the Kyoto target emissions, it could end up costing US taxpayers up to $800 billion dollars over the life of the agreement.

In short, Kyoto is nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth scheme from the industrialized world to impoverished and corrupt third world kleptocracies. No wonder one of its major supporters is that noted environmentalist and humanitarian Fidel Castro.

What are the pro-Kyoto scientists afraid of? Peer review is the lifeblood of scientific advancement. Unless your theories can stand up to the challenges of your peers, their not worth the paper they’re printed on. And with climate models, CO2 projections, and other greehouse gas emission predictions being so wildly off target the last few years, it may be that the proponents of the theory are just not up to the task of defending their work.

All they’re doing is defeating their own purpose. The US is never going to ratify Kyoto unless it’s amended to include China, the biggest polluter on the planet today, under its restrictive protocols. Even then, unless real debate is allowed, it’s doubtful that Kyoto has much of a future.