“The ‘planetary tidal influence on climate’ fiasco: strong armed science tactics are overkill, due process would work better” (2014-01-18). Hey Anthony, this is just like that day the football team locked themselves in the school office and replaced morning announcements with fart sounds and declarations that “art class sucks”. Eventually the adults pulled the plug and it slowly dawned on the jocks that they’d made a laughingstock of themselves.

So, in the here and now, a little cabal of denialists managed (with just a smidgen of misrepresentation) to launch a “peer-reviewed” journal they titled  Pattern Recognition In Physics under the legitimate auspices of Copernicus Publications. They even managed to pull off two issues, stacked with their own papers, before the bullshit detectors pegged and their journal was abruptly terminated.

Says Copernicus Publications about the editorial conniving:

the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing and not in accordance with our publication ethics we expect to be followed by the editors.

and

Therefore, we at Copernicus Publications wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of the journal as well as the malpractice regarding the review process, and decided on 17 January 2014 to cease the publication of PRP.

Anthony Watts can merely sniff about unsubstantiated external pressure from “team climate science”, “strong-arm gang tactics” and how, if they’d only been given a chance to ‘splain, “due process would have been the right way to approach the issue”. This has to be done carefully though, because even Anthony is backing away from the stupid as fast as he can and admits, as meekly as possible, that their claims of a “planetary tidal influence on climate is likely a bit of overkill”.

Anthony sniffs that Astronomy and Astrophysics didn’t collapse after publishing a similarly poor paper by Abreu et al. entitled Is there a planetary influence on solar activity? so why should this journal?

Anthony, there’s a difference between a bad paper getting through review at a reputable journal and a dishonest journal created for the purpose of giving a stream of bad papers the appearance of credibility. Perspective’s a bitch.

Still, celebrated scientist denialist blogger Joanna Nova trumpets that “the new line in the sand is to write a paper so hot they have to terminate the whole journal!” I guess Pattern Recognition in Physics’s science jujitsu is so strong that Jo’s cute idea of flooding the Copernicus Publications inboxes with hate mail is only a polite suggestion. It just looks like editorial and scientific deception!

Too bad for Roger Tattersall, aka “Tallbloke”, a truculent denialist blogger engineer/historian and regular commenter at Watts Up With That. He’s wearing two conflicting hats here; appointed to the journal’s rigged editorial board on the basis of no qualification whatsoever (denialist blogging?)  and also tagging along as a delighted junior author of one of the papers that broke the camel’s back. Now he wails about the harsh fist of censorship while his readers sagely drop the Hitler bomb.

This new comedy is just another instance of resentful, impotent, denialists clustering together like cockroaches in a little backwater hoping to boil forth and startle a small child into dropping their ice-cream. Remember the Climate Research misfire? Energy & Environment also has a long history of slipping denialist boners into the mix.

Follow the new bouncing ball at Open Mind and Rabett Run.

There’s also a good perspective at And The There’s Physics

A bit more on this juicy incident;

• Greg Laden’s blog: Science Denialists Make Fake Journal, Get Shut Down.
  Greg coverage brought this statement by Copernicus Publications, from Roger Tattersall’s own bitter post, which kind of puts the whole matter in perspective:

  We were alarmed by the authors’ second implication stating “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”. Before the journal was launched, we had a long discussion regarding its topics. The aim of the journal was to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines. PRP was never meant to be a platform for climate sceptics. In addition to our doubts about the scientific content of PRP, we also received information about potential misconduct during the review process.

• Science magazine: Alleging ‘Malpractice’ With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal