Not a Sceptic

See Miranda Devine’s “Tide rises against climate lies”, in The Daily Telegraph:

Exhibit B [of the totalitarian nature of climate politics in Australia] is coastal engineer Doug Lord, former coast manager of the NSW environment department.
Amid exaggerated predictions that sea levels would rise by 75m, Lord made the career-ending mistake of actually measuring the sea level and trying to publish the results.
This caused him to be “let go” from his government job and have peer-reviewed scientific papers pulled at the last minute from a conference in Shanghai last year, from a conference in Perth in September and from a journal where they were to be published this year.
Not only that, but he was banned by his bosses at the NSW environment department from representing Engineers Australia, whose national coastal committee he chaired, at a 2009 parliamentary inquiry into managing climate change.  The irony is that he is not even a sceptic.
“I’m not a climate change sceptic.  I believe in the climate change science but I see the need for the real data to be out there,” he said.
Revolutionary concept.

See Imre Salusinszky’s “Blocked sea-level research probe” in The Australian:

Environment Minister Robyn Parker has asked department officials to explain why they put the lid on internal research that questioned catastrophic predictions of sea-level rises as a result of climate change.
A former senior researcher in the department, Doug Lord, said yesterday two papers he co-authored with colleagues and was due to present at conferences were suppressed because they suggested sea-levels on the east coast are rising at only one tenth of the rate estimated by the federal government, based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Mr Lord said long-term data gleaned from gauges in Sydney Harbour suggested sea levels were rising at the rate of about 1mm per year.  This would lead to a rise of about 90mm by 2100, not the 900mm rise predicted by the IPCC.
“We can’t identify an acceleration of the rate, which doesn't mean that it’s not there,” Mr Lord told The Australian.  “But if it’s going to reach those levels, it’s got to accelerate at some time in the future.”
Mr Lord, who does not question the science of climate change, said the papers were pulled by the department at the last minute, after they had been accepted and peer-reviewed.

Mr Lord is “not a climate change sceptic”; he should be.

Mr Lord “does not question the science of climate change”; he should.

UPDATE (14 December):  even New Scientist, in its sad, decrepit dotage, can on occasion provide something worthwhile: