About us

ScienceTalks.nl is owned and facilitated by the Environment, Science and Policy Foundation (Stichting Milieu, Wetenschap & Beleid), with website www.MWenB.nl.

Scientific control and content policy rest with our chief editor André Bijkerk.

Why start a new forum?
Climategate.nl has proven itself to be an independent, open and influential platform for sharing opinions about climate, since it began in 2009. To safeguard the openness and the unbiased discussion, hardly any moderation has been applied.

For serious discussion about climate science, however, a lack of moderation is not the best format. This scientific discussion is gaining attention, since more and more independent thinkers are coming up with science-based ideas about climate, seeking discussion forums to test check their ideas with the experts.
This is why we have decided to expand, and open a new forum on our site, called Science Talks, which will feature scientific ideas that can contribute to the understanding of climate science, and encourage scientific discussion about them. To increase the accessibility of our forum and enhance the quality of the discussion, it will be in English.

The idea of Science Talks remains the same as that of the main forum of climategate.nl :
* Contributions are the opinion and responsibility of the authors, and publishing them by no means implies our endorsement.
* Discussion will be open for all opinions and moderation will be impartial.

But the format will be quite different:
* The postings will be required to have the format that we see as optimal for a good discussion.
* The comments are subject to moderation on several criteria, to keep the discussion scientific and productive, and free of personal attacks.

Why compete with existing independent blogs on climate science?
Of course there are highly regarded sites like wattsupwiththat.com, Jo Nova’s blog, and Climate Etc. and we certainly do not intend to compete with them. They more or less represent a settled skeptical view on climate science, and will not easily publish ideas conflicting with those views.
We will provide a platform for open discussion of new ideas that are interesting or promising, without necessarily believing that they are right. Let us discuss them and find out!

If someone’s new idea leads to a good discussion and appears to be a real contribution to science, we would of course be very proud if the author would be asked to present his hypothesis on the major sites!

Topics are expected to be mainly about new ideas relating to climate in general, but may also consist of new ideas criticizing existing climate science and its methods or data.

Are there enough interesting new theories to justify this forum?
You would be surprised!
In and around the climategate team there are already several authors eager to share their ideas.

And there are many other people who would like to have their ideas examined in such discussions. At every Heartland climate conference there are several posters with exciting new ideas, and the organizer of the conferences said that at every conference there are dozens of people, quite often engineers, asking for a platform for their new hypotheses. So we feel encouraged that we are providing a very welcome platform to the authors, and will facilitate interesting discussions for the scientifically interested readers.

This means that we would be very happy to feature a new hypothesis that appears to change climate science forever. But we will also be happy if a hypothesis is falsified as a result of a good discussion.

What kind of topics can I expect? Science Talks will mainly focus on new, yet unproven ideas and hypotheses about the physical working of climate. Skeptical scientists have been attacking the claims of the mainstream climate activists successfully for a long time, but have not yet come up with a convincing theory that can clearly explain or predict climate variations over time. Many new and promising hypotheses, that could be building stones for such a theory, have come up in recent years, and need to be examined and proven right or wrong, in order to achieve progress in climate science.

These ideas cover a wide range of topics: from influence of solar cycles, cosmic rays, planetary and lunar gravity influence, ocean currents to chaos theory. And of course many, many hypotheses on the radiation effects of CO2 concentration increase on climate change, and the actual accuracy of temperature measurements by proxies and isotopes, and gauging stations.