The latest in science scandals: a small, closed group of self-glorifying and like-minded climate scientists have been caught giving each other prizes and money in a clear abuse of science.

If there were a prize for science nepotism, this year it would have to go to: RealClimate, namely the following scientists:

Stefan Rahmstorf
Katherine Hayhoe
Richard C. J. Somerville
Kevin E. Trenberth
Michael E. Mann
Gavin A. Schmidt

Science nepotism comes as no surprise to climate science critics and skeptics, who have long known that an exclusive inner circle of like-minded, wagon-circling climate scientists have been giving each other prizes and awards to pump their already inflated egos.

But thanks to Twitter member Schub, a glaring example of groupthink nepotism in action is presented here, The Climate Science Communication Award:

You see something funny here? @theAGU prize committee and prize recipients are a small handful of people who know each other, giving awards to each other: pic.twitter.com/g2E4GQjUyf

— Shub (@shubclimate) September 4, 2018

Racket: giving each other prizes, and money

As Schub points out, many of the the Climate Communication Prize Committee members themselves are the winners of the “Climate Communication Prize”. In other words these scientists are giving each other prizes year after year.

Included with the Climate Communication Prize is a “monetary prize”, and so the scam is extra profitable for the cozy group of scientists.

Imagine a contest where one of the judges wins almost every year. It needs to be investigated if there’s not some sort of racket going on here.

2018 winner: RealClimate’s Michael E. Mann

This year (2018) the Science Communication Prize prize went to (drum roll) Michael E. Mann, which shows that you don’t necessarily need to be on the prize committee to win it. It’s enough to be a regular at Gavin Schmidt’s Real Climate.

Next year the best odds of winning the prize have to go to Michael Oppenheimer or Ed Maibach.

Same structures used for peer review

The same modus operandi is used for publishing in academic journals. The same small group of like-minded alarmist scientists act as gatekeepers to keep out dissenting science, while waving through papers from their friends. This is why in climate science the process of quality control for publishing scientific results has become to be known as “pal-review”.

“Communication” prize winners blocking other opinions!

This small group of self-glorifying scientists is really quite exclusive, so much so that they block all dissenters at Twitter. For example as PhD scientist Ned Nikolov recently experienced:

This is remarkable! A few days ago, I pointed Katharine Hayhoe to our new published research and politely invited her to debate fundamentals of the climate greenhouse theory: https://t.co/uaj2ZkD2u6
I just discovered that, in response to my invitation, she simply blocked me!🤨 pic.twitter.com/ema03Wrrwh

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) September 4, 2018

Clearly within the nepotistic circle of the RealClimate scientists, the “climate communication prize” goes to people who shut down communication, and, for goodness sake, not to those who would promote it.

Grave ethical questions

And because the the prize involves the award of money, serious ethical violations, if not criminal, could be at play here.