From the Powerline:

About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.”  Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior…

…Well, you can imagine what happened next.  Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing…

The BBC also finds another problem with Dr. Spencer – seems he’s a committed Christian!  Well, that tears it – when Christians are involved you know that something is fishy!  Can’t have Christians casting doubt upon climate change orthodoxy, now can we?  In classic Stalinist mode, liberal fascists have not only got the editor to resign, but got him to state that he shouldn’t have published the article.

Some years back I wrote an article entitled The Death of Science…about how politicized scientists, themselves, were destroying the respect science had among the public.  For well more than a century, if you put the label of “science” on an assertion, belief among the public was automatic…but now we’ve all seen just too much nonsense dressed up as science.   It just makes matters worse when we see dissenting scientists persecuted for speaking up.

The really bad news here is that we do need science – we need, that is, to be able to use our human reason to discover what we can of the truth.  God made the universe intelligible and gave us reason so that we may explore the universe.  From what we can see, God wants us to learn the truth…but we can’t learn the truth if we are forever cutting ourselves off because of some prejudice.  It used to be that religion was, at times, a bar to free inquiry…now the ostensible advocates of free inquiry are standing athwart the pursuit of truth yelling, “stop!”.  If these people get their way, we’ll shortly be back in a dark age…free inquiry will stop, innovation will dry up and we’ll even start to forget things we’ve already learned.

Everyone who is in favor of the truth – who is fearlessly determined that the truth be known, come what may, should be frightened about this sort of action.  A few corrupt purveyors of an ideology are trying to shut down debate…shut down the search for truth.  They are doing it because great, big gobs of money are at stake, as are the reputations of those who have most ardently advanced the notion that human CO2 emissions are a primary culprit in global warming…an assertion which is at the least entirely unproved, and at worst is outright false.  If we want to be a people of truth, we’d better darn well put a stop to this.