Science is Not Science When it is Politics

I am growing increasingly concerned about suppression of heterodox views in science. This story in the Telegraph, I think, demonstrates the point. It is about the stifling of scientists who are skeptical about the conventional view about the existence of global warming and its causes.

I don’t want to get into the global warming issue. What concerns me is the stifling of opposing views—which is a corruption of science. From the story: Scientists who questioned mankind’s impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community. They say the debate on global warming has been “hijacked” by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions... “Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor. “I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”...

“Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology...recently claimed: “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.”

I have seen the same suppression in the human cloning issue. Scientists who have an ethical objection are threatened with firing if they express them publicly. They are informed that their careers will be in tatters if they support an “anti-science” view. They will not be invited to symposia or asked to write book chapters. If they don’t have tenure, they are toast. If they do, they are shunned to the sidelines.

The media are quick to jump on the Bush Administration for suppressing views with which it disagrees, a matter about which I have no opinion. But with rare exceptions, such as the story in the Telegraph, they are silent about the bullying when it comes from the other direction. Indeed, I have tried to interest media in this story only to be met by barely stifled yawns.