ANTHROPOGENIC (man-made) Global Warming (AGW) is the core dogma of the Green movement, which believes that industrial civilisation will cause catastrophic global warming. From the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change downwards, governments worldwide accept the AGW theory and fund university research into it.

Chris Bluemel of the Green Party (In My View, July 15) does not believe that climate scientists lose funding if their research challenges the theory of AGW. Why not? Because, Chris says, as “funding is provided for research before it begins, not after it has concluded, this is obviously not true.”

But then if scientists’ research challenged AGW, that could be the last time they got funds from their government’s science research council.

One sign of the suppression of dissent against AGW among climate scientists is that so many of the public critics of AGWhave been emeritus professors, that is retired professors. Nils Axel Morner, Harold Warren Lewis, Richard Siegmund Lindzen, and Ian Rutherford Plimer, to name a few. Emeritus professors no longer have to seek grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose future funding and careers would be endangered by their criticism of AGW. Consequently they can speak out freely.

Chris Bluemel also defends the “peer review” system for publishing scientific research, by which scientists are published only if their papers pass review by a panel of scientists in their field (a panel of their “peers”).

Chris seems unaware of the skulduggery exposed in November 2009, when confidential computer files were leaked from the influential Hadley Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which is funded by the Meteorological Office.

These files included many emails between the believers in AGW discussing how to gang up to exclude dissenting scientists from “peer review” panels.

Scientific method welcomes attempts to disprove scientific theories and gives such dissent a fair hearing.

But with regard to the theory of AGW, scientific method has been abandoned, which is a real catastrophe, and it is happening now.

Ralph Prothero from Southampton.