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The following letter was sent to Professor Joseph Serene, an officer of the American Physical Society (APS), by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, author of "Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered", a paper featured in the July edition of the APS newsletter, Physics and Society:

Dear Professor Serene - A Fellow of the APS has drawn my attention to a new policy apparently adopted by the Executive Board of the American Physical Society, to the effect that every paper published in any APS journal must in future carry a disclaimer to the effect that it has not been peer-reviewed. The Executive Board appears to have acted thus because Lawrence Krauss, a notorious, Marxist political activist who found uncongenial the conclusions of a paper by me that appeared in the July 2008 issue of Physics and Society, came under pressure from his political faction to undermine and repudiate my paper by means other than the usual scientific debate. Krauss was not able to debate the content of my paper scientifically, since it was beyond his expertise.

It was Krauss who ordered a disclaimer to be posted above my paper, saying a) that it had not been peer-reviewed, when it had been; b) that the majority of international scientific opinion opposed its conclusions, when he had no scientific basis for that statement; and c) that the Council of the American Physical Society disagreed with my paper's conclusions, even though the Council had not in fact met to consider my paper. Under pressure from me, and from numerous Fellows and members of the APS, two of Krauss' three falsehoods were removed, but the falsehood about the paper not having been peer-reviewed remained in place. The paper had in fact been meticulously reviewed by an eminent professor of physics, who was also the review editor of Physics and Society. He was fully competent to conduct the review, since his intention was that my argument should be understandable to any physicist, whether or not he or she were a climatologist. I am concerned that the Executive Board has now either prevented peer-review from taking place in the APS' journals or insisted, as Krauss did to his great discredit, that its editors should lie to the effect that papers with which the APS Council might disagree have not been peer-reviewed, even when they have been.

I am also given to understand that the APS has adopted a policy of declaring what amounts to no more than a religious belief in the notion of dangerous anthropogenic "global warming". It is questionable whether a scientific society should adopt religious or political positions on matters of legitimate debate, particularly during a period when the computer predictions upon which the APS' policy is imprudently founded have been proven incompetent and false by seven full years of global cooling that has occurred notwithstanding record increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Not one of the AOGCMs relied upon by the IPCC predicted that cooling. One has only to look at the IPCC's table of natural and anthropogenic forcings to appreciate that none of those forcings can explain the failure of temperatures to rise as predicted: indeed, according to the UAH satellite record, 2008 may well turn out to be cooler than 1980 - 28 years ago.

The only logically-justifiable scientific conclusions are either that natural variability even over quite long periods is sufficient altogether to overthrow the anthropogenic signal in the temperature record (in which event, by the same token, the warming from 1975-1998 may well have been largely natural, and it would certainly not be possible to say there was a 90% probability that it was chiefly anthropogenic), or that the radiative forcing from carbon dioxide enrichment is, as my paper and many others find it to be, considerably smaller than the exaggerated and now-falsified estimates of the IPCC (in which event "global warming" is self-evidently a non-problem).

Therefore I invite the Executive Board, however tempted it may be by the lavish taxpayer funding available to those who genuflect to what is no more than a quasi-theological belief that the increase of one-ten-thousandth part in the proportion of the atmosphere occupied by CO2 since 1750 can somehow put the planet at serious risk, to resist the State-subsidized ending of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, to reconsider the Council's policy declaration in favor of the new faith, and to allow open, scientific debate on alleged (but non-existent) "global warming" and other scientific issues within the pages of its journals without posting silly, unscientific, and mendacious disclaimers over learned papers, such as mine, that its editors have commissioned, reviewed, accepted, and published.

[Christopher] Monckton of Brenchley