Suppressing the Heretics, or "Hey - wait a second - weren't we told that all Climate Scientists agreed on Global Warming?"

Powerline describes a bit of science thuggery that doesn't look at all like the pristine free inquiry/free discussion that utopian atheists are always describing:

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. (This issue is closely related, though not identical, to the post I had up last weekend on Nature’s blockbuster cosmic ray paper.) As Spencer explains on his blog: “Even the IPCC admits the biggest uncertainty in how much human-caused climate change we will see is the degree to which cloud feedback [temperature change => cloud change] will magnify (or reduce) the weak direct warming tendency from more CO2 in the atmosphere.”


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. Better still, they seem to have given him the full Rubashov treatment and forced a confession:

Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell… is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.

“Should not have been published.” Even though it passed peer review, and finds lots of company among scientists and other journal articles. And besides, if it’s been attacked on the internet by the climate mafia, then it must be wrong!

You can understand why the Climate McCarthyites want to suppress Dr. Spencer. He’s only been a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA for more than a decade, co-designer of NASA’s satellites that monitor global temperatures, winner of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and author of several books on the subject, including Climate Confusion, and The Great Global Warming Blunder.

Here is Dr. Spencer's blog article on the impact of cloud formation on climate change.
 
Watt's Up With That?  points out the distorted understanding of science that underlies the nearly libellous attacks on Dr. Spencer:
 

One point Dr. Pielke touches on related to an orbital decay correction applied to the UAH satellite measurement comes from his first hand experience, and I urge readers to read it fully to get the history. One line from the op-ed in The Daily Climate bothered me in particular:


Over the years, Spencer and Christy developed a reputation for making serial mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover.

This my friends, is breathtaking for its sheer arrogance, agenda, and the scuttling of the scientific process in one sentence.

The entire process of science is about building on early incomplete knowledge with new knowledge, and discarding old knowledge in favor of new evidence that is better understood and supported by observational evidence. All scientists make mistakes, it is part of the learning process of science. Any scientist who believes he/she hasn’t made mistakes, has never made a correction, or hasn’t built upon the mistakes of others to improve the science is deluding themselves.

And that crack about “…mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover.” is ludicrous. By the very nature of the scientific process, scientists work to uncover flaws in the work of others, and when mistakes and irrelevancies are burned away by this process, what is left in the crucible of scientific inquiry is regarded as the pure product.

By the way, this is the way that science actually works, according to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."  Science doesn't advance by persuading scientists to give up their cherished beliefs; it advances by outliving scientists who won't give up their cherished beliefs.  If it is a real scientific revolution, you expect the name-calling from scientists who see their life's work threatened. 

That's why the purported consensus on Global Warming always seemed dubious to me - there was no dissent! But, human beings being human, there had to be dissent, which meant that the consensus was a political artifact and the dissenters were being muzzled, which meant that Global Warming wasn't a project of science, but of politics.
 
Also note that the Leftist supporters of Global Warming theory see the issue as ideological.  The BBC goes out of its way in an article on Dr. Spencer to include his religious background, as if that had any bearing on science:
 

Dr Spencer is one of the team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that keeps a record of the Earth's temperature as determined from satellite readings.


He is also on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing thinktank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change "would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs" and "could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life".

Gosh, he's an evangelical Christian, and we are assured by Richard Dawkins that a person can't be a Christian and a scientist, so what more do we need to know.

Again, according to Kuhn, ideology matters to a certain extent.  Cultural and theological and ideological background may predispose a person to accept a congenial scientific theory.  But that effect applies to everyone, not just Christians.  If we are going to judge the merits of scientific studies on the ideology of the scientists, then it is time to find out how many pro-AGW scientists vote for Democrats and Big Government.

But that way lies madness.