Renowned, multi-award winning science writer Dr. David Whitehouse – who has an asteroid named after him – has slammed the New Scientist as “offensive and prejudicial” for rejecting a feature it commissioned from him on the Earth’s inner core after it discovered that he serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The GWPF is a climate contrarian think tank founded by the former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
In an email exchange seen by the Daily Sceptic, Daniel Cousins, Head of Features at the New Scientist, made the focus of the proposed piece clear:
…it would be first about how we’ve finally confirmed the existence of this inner core… then I guess it becomes about what we know about it’s structure (speculation about iron crystals, etc.) and how it formed… And finally, I guess we’d want to explore what the various scenarios for how it formed might inform how we think about habitability on other planets.
However, just 21 minutes after the commission was agreed, Dr. Whitehouse received a follow-up email from Mr. Cousins informing him that his affiliation with the GWPF rendered him “unsuitable” to write for the magazine:
Hi David,
I am writing with bad news, I’m afraid.
Barely a moment after I sent the email around my colleagues regarding that commission, one of my managers called to ask me if I was aware that you are on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and therefore not someone we can having writing for us.
I am of course as disappointed as you, because this is a good idea for a story – and we now can’t do aid [sic] story, because it not be fair [sic] to have someone else report and write it. Regardless, we can no longer proceed.
Clearly, I should have done my due diligence on this – and I am sorry to have wasted your time.
Thanks, Dan
Dr. Whitehouse wrote to Nina Wright, the New Scientist’s Chief Executive, demanding an explanation:
The reason given for the cancellation of the contract was stated to be my association with the Global Warming Policy Foundation – a policy organisation that is in broad agreement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the absence of any further explanation, it is clear that New Scientist has censored and reneged on a contract based solely on my professional affiliation. The cancellation of the article, which was on a completely unrelated topic, after it was negotiated and commissioned, is offensive and prejudicial treatment. More alarmingly, it could be taken as evidence of New Scientist exhibiting media bias and a cancel culture that would belittle its reputation.
Eventually, the Editor-in-Chief, Emily Wilson, responded:
…whilst it is a matter of regret that the New Scientist was not able to proceed with the proposed commission, we do not agree that the cancelling of the commission was “offensive” or “prejudicial”. Furthermore, any suggestion of a media bias is firmly denied.
Instead, it is simply the case that each and every item published in the New Scientist is done so at the Editor’s discretion and with the final approval of the Editor.
Needless to say, Dr. Whitehouse was unimpressed by this explanation:
Your reply completely fails to address the serious issues I have raised of media bias and censorship at New Scientist.
Having been an editor myself, and at one time was approached to consider applying for the Editorship of New Scientist, I find your lengthy explanation of the rights of an editor rather patronising. New Scientist can cancel a commission for whatever reason it wants, but in this instance you told me the reason. It had nothing to do with the subject or the quality of the commissioned article about which you were very enthusiastic, and having written a book on the topic I was an ideal contributor.
The reason New Scientist gave for cancelation after the commission was agreed, along with submission date, possible publication date and fee, was, you wrote, that you had just become aware of my association with a think tank – the Global Warming Policy Foundation – that, as its name suggests, considers climate change policy. The GWPF is supportive of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. Whilst I understand that some of New Scientist’s environmental reporters would take issue with the GWPF on some matters, science thrives on debate and scrutiny. Developing policy of course depends upon many factors of which science is but one.
According to New Scientist’s intolerance this meant that I should be censored even though the commissioned article was about a subject about as far removed from climate change as it is possible to get.
In so doing New Scientist has demonstrated clear prejudice, censorship and a no-platforming seen so often in examples of cancel culture. It is irrelevant you maintaining a firm denial of media bias when it was clearly expressed on two occasions in the email New Scientist sent me. I am sure anyone who reads the email would be in no doubt as to its prejudicial nature.
The snub echoes one received by Professor Norman Fenton earlier this month and reported in the Daily Sceptic when an NHS conference cancelled his presentation over an unrelated “Twitter vaccine controversy”, citing fears that “it may distract”.
The cancellation of eminent science writers and statisticians like Dr. Whitehouse and Professor Fenton for ‘wrongthink’ highlights the ever-shrinking boundaries of the discourse around science and medicine and the unwillingness of science’s gatekeepers to challenge groupthink and politically sensitive dogmas. As Dr. Whitehouse says, “science thrives on debate and scrutiny”. Silencing those who challenge prevailing orthodoxies was the approach favoured by the Catholic church in 17th Century Italy and is completely at odds with the scientific method.
Stop Press: The corruption of science by politics is the theme of a brilliant essay in the July/August edition of the Skeptical Inquirer by the scientists Jerry Coyne and Luana Moraja, who raise the alarm about the capture of biology (their subject) by critical social justice ideology. They argue that “the science that has brought us so much progress and understanding… is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication”.
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I used to be a subscriber to the New Scientist, as I’m very interested in science and technology. Then after a while nearly every story had something shoehorned in about climate change, often pushing the anthropomorphic angle, and the magazine became overtly anti-brexit.
In the end I cancelled my subscription as I was just getting increasingly annoyed by the bias which was detrimentally affecting the content of the magazine. I wanted to read interestring science stories, not be preached at or propagandized.
New Scientist? Non Scientist more like!
Me too.
I stopped about 5 years ago.
Theirs is the ONLY way to the truth and light – climate change, covid, lockdowns, vaccines lgbt etc.
And they have the cheek to carry on calling themselves a Science Magazine.
SPAM!
The New Scientist, clearly not a paper concerned with Science but concerned with conscensus, I suspect a few hundred years ago the same paper if it had existed would have cancelled those who claimed the earth to be round.
No one believed the earth was flat from about 300 BC onwards. That is 19th century bullshit found in fake histories. Columbus’ problem was that he lied about the distance to the east Indies and those who needed to fund him, intuited that. Last time I checked the President of the Flat Earth Society was a Darwinian Climate Changer. How appropriate.
What’s your point? mine was that Science conducted properly is all about debate, about research, data, evidence and about challenge, it is not a static discipline, it must not be closed, it has to take challenge, if it does not permit, or closes down alternative evidence, data and theories then its not really science, its dogma.
Where we would we be today if challenge and debate had not taken place around the nature of disease and its spread, the need for strict hygiene when performing an operation, the fact that setting fire to herbs in the corner of a room would ward off the evil vapours causing disease.
More relevant is that the Catholic Church only withdrew its condemnation of Galileo’s proposition of a Sun-centric system in 1992. From what I’ve read the general public, and the whole of China (until the 17th century) believed the Earth to be flat.
SPAM!
A tragic indicator of the times. But let me briefly comment on the Stop Press.
Hypocrisy is evident here, as cancel culture started in the biology community, and particularly with Jerry Coyne, who in maintaining the hegemony of the old Neodarwinian paradigm publicly smeared his colleague at Chicago, James Shapiro, of “Creationism” for daring to propose non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution.
Indeed, one of the authors on my own blog, an accomplished biologist who then had a senior job at the NIH, was constrained in what he could write for us as he knew Coyne, and was seriously worried that the latter would create trouble both for him and for the NIH.
The pot, here, is calling the kettle black.
Evolution is about as anti-science as one can get. Shrew to you. Just took trillions of years. I have spent 25 years looking for proof of the pigeon breeders metaphysics. They are well hidden notwithstanding the massive corrupt investments in the theology. Suggest you start with Tony Flew and work from there. Detox slowly.
I may have been there already. 65 years interest in zoology and palaeontology, Cambridge natural sciences, career in medicine and 14 years post retirement studying the science, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, theology of science. A lot of Aquinas, a bit of Flew, etc etc. Conversation partners in all camps. A couple of books.
You’re right that the crux is metaphysics, not science.
You see, this is where the Daily Sceptic really earns it’s laurels, having readers on board who are immensely well read and informed who can shed deeper insights into these and other issues. Thanks Jon.
Dissidents needs its interlechewals, init? 🙂
Am I right in thinking that the comic is to be renamed “New The Scientist”.
I am worried that GWPF believes and wants the public to know that it is in broad agreement with IPCC, as if that was relevant to the issue in hand.
IIRC the majority of the IPCC reports are reasonably sound. The alarmists write the Executive Summary section which is the only bit that all of the policy wonks and MSM are interested in.
Another example, if another one was really needed of the tyranny that exists on this issue. In science scepticism is the highest calling and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. Not being able to question things means it is NOT science. But then it was never about science from the very beginning. The dogma of Climate Change survives only by a multitude of lies and fabrications. The three main tools are DECEIPT FEAR and GUILT. In science a theory must be capable of being falsified, but global warming depends almost entirely on modelled scenarios —–“The data does not matter, we are not basing our recommendations on the data, we are basing them on climate models”. (Professor Folland, Hadley)—- Yet even as all the models have so far not just been wrong, but very wrong, more model scenario’s are simply churned out as evidence of impending catastrophe and this all gets called “science”. ———–No, it isn’t. Models are NOT science and are NOT evidence of anything. “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful” (David Frame of Oxford School of Enterprise and the Environment)——–But useful for what? For POLITICS, not for science. ————-Alleged consensus and manufactured crisis is NOT science. Without this fabricated science and state of fear about a climate emergency the politics cannot survive. The whole Sustainable Development Eco Socialist Agenda collapses. That is why the compliant media (BBC, SKY, CNN, Guardian, Independent etc etc and formerly scientific publications now hijacked by politics keep it going with their phony pretend to save the planet junk science reporting and the banishing of any and all dissent from current orthodoxy.
I hadn’t realised that the New Scientist was a faith-based publication.
There’s nothing Scientific about Dogma.
In the new fundamentalism, science journals, such as the New Scientist, have capitulated to the dominant creed and that means no one associated with rational discourse or honest, robust debate on the issue of climate change will be tolerated. The GWPF, which started one week after the climategate email scandal, states that it is there to: “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.” Not so long ago, that would have been widely welcomed, seen as a solid and reasonable set of goals to have but no more. Now anyone even associated with such heresy shall not be given a platform regardless. Bit by bit, they shut down any attempt at debate, and censor and cancel at will. Nowadays, you have to be squeaky clean, preferably wearing a rainbow badge, and, even more preferably, not a white older male. Just another nail in the coffin of the old world.
$cientism. A religion. Church of. Money. Get published. Control. Own resources. Nothing to do with real facts or how the natural world operates. What idiot could possibly believe that hydrocarbon ’emissions’ from humans – a rounding error mole fraction of nothing – causes anything.
“science thrives on debate and scrutiny”
Yes but only if it’s about science in the first place. New Scientist are now the ‘respectable and informed’ face of the cult.
Welcome to that new dark ages, the new witch hunters are all around us, The age of enlightenment and learning is dead. The west now survives, not from the survival of the fittest, but from the survival of the thickest. This new dark age has been approaching slowly in the past, it will soon speed up its approach as an avalanche that will crush all the things we took for granted, free speech, free thought, freedom of expression, money, movement, choice. Civilisational peaks of the past, Greek, Roman, etc, all were followed by a darker age, welcome to ours.
“Survival of the thickest”, a perfect summary. 👍
New Science seems to be taking a leaf out of the science practiced during less enlightened times. The Vatican may no longer be conducting the inquisition and subsequent excommunication, but the torch has neen passed on it seems.
A closer parallel might be Rome’s response to the exposure of abuses at the Reformation. The corruption of the Pope and his power structures was taken (by said Pope and power structures) as an attack on Christianity itself, or rather upon God (“tearing the seamless robe of Christ).
And the rationale was much the same: just as the faith (the spiritual reality of the universe) was assumed to be the same as the human organisation, so science (the physical reality of the universe) is assumed to identical with the human edifices of science. In both cases, the realities point an accusing finger at the organisations.
We have vigorously re-entered “less enlightened times”. 2 + 2 = 5 because we we say it does or wish it so.
When was the last time Tony Blair was banned from publishing, speaking or being interviewed due to his involvement in the Iraq War? I thought not…
An American counterpart of mine said on the occasion of Blairs election win. Beware, a rattle snake always smiles before he bites. I have never found fault in his statement.
As I said throughout the lockdown era, there’s a formula which defines how we run our lives today: Politics+Science=Politics. Substitute ‘science’ for any other discipline and the same applies. Politics has replaced the Church of old. The Church itself was at the forefront of much scientific investigation until certain forces within felt threatened.
Today, politics has become a religion. ‘I’m a socialist!’ some people proudly claim. ‘I’m a Green’ say others. It’s no different from proclaiming yourself Catholic or Protestant in the past. Unfortunately, the modern political religions are far more destructive. Most historic religious strife that turned violent was really about land ownership rather than doctrine. The modern political religion is closer to ISIS, wanting your absolute obedience and destroying our history to get what it wants. It’s psychopathic enough that it will gladly freeze thousands of people to death in the winter by creating an artificial fuel crisis. About 100 years ago, the Soviet Union came into existence. Now, the West has slowly become the Soviet Union, with a dash of Maoism and ISIS.
The Hijacking of Science.
Out of interest, I’ve now read through the first example of this brilliant essay which took me from Covaxxes are great! to Gender theory is about something real and important! (instead of Some nonsense of no concern to anyone but its inventors.) These are obviously – and intentionally – loaded paraphrases. Considering these two statements, I can’t help thinking that the problem of the autors seems to be that they excepted the woketards would never come for them when they only resolutely stood aside and made noncommitted handsigns while they were coming for everyone else. Now, to their surprise, they find themselves in the crosshairs and rather devoid of allies who could still help them.
Didn’t someone write a short poem about something very similar?
SPAM!
Read the Coyne/Moraja article. Worth 20 minutes
Galileo and Copernicus come to mind while reading this.
If the new Scientist was in existence then we might still believe that the Sun revolved around the earth.
The essence of true science is the debate and discussion of ideas and theories, backed up by evidence.
Unfortunately too much of science has become an ideology or religion, not true science.
Maybe the name could be changed from ‘New Scientist’ to ‘Not Science’.
Free thought got a boost by putting a statement on a church door in the 1500’s.
Maybe something similar has to happen again.
Next – burn the heretics?