Has the Infant Science of Climatology Oversold the Coming Catastrophe?

Many climate scientists are beginning to suspect that they have allowed their profession to become a circus.

Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new Democratic-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.

Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer's heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.

In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.

"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.

....Would junior scientists feel compelled to mute their findings, out of concern for their careers, if the research contradicts the climate change consensus?

"I can understand how a scientist without tenure can feel the community pressures," says environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a colleague of Vranes' at the University of Colorado.

Pielke says he has felt pressure from his peers: A prominent scientist angrily accused him of being a skeptic, and a scientific journal editor asked him to "dampen" the message of a peer-reviewed paper to derail skeptics and business interests.

Source.


Is there really a similarity between the top-down forcing of opinion in climate science, and purges and inquisitions in political and religious history? After all, science is not populated by disinterested saints, but by humans who are just as vain and pompous and contemptuous of those who contradict their pet theories as any occupation. It should not be too surprising if threats are made against meteorologists and others who refuse to meekly repeat the "official" stance on an issue of scientific debate such as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. If some data and discussion is suppressed in the interest of presenting a unified front to the public, would you really be that surprised?

As one commenter here stated:

• James Hansen advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of AGW

• .... Dr. Heidi Cullen advocating decertifying colleagues who express contrarian positions on greenhouse warming

• British Foreign Secretary Beckett comparing “climate-change skeptics” to terrorists

• Labeling scientists who question the evidence for AGW as “Deniers” (read Holocaust Deniers)

• The Royal Society admonishing organizations that question the link between greenhouse emissions and global warming,

• Re-introduction this week of the Orwellian “fairness doctrine” legislation by Congress

Does anyone else see a nasty pattern developing here? I don’t like the picture.

While the heavy-handed tactics of the orthodoxy of CAGW may not be a sinister and diabolical as the above commenter implies, the end result is the suppression of science in the interest of promoting politically motivated biases.