Scientists are people too
And they are subject to the failings that the rest of the human race is prone to
Last week Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit website cracked the walls of the fortress at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit. A “mole” sent him a sample of global temperature data that CRU Director Dr. Phil Jones had refused to share with the climate audit community. By Sunday Christopher Booker had reported the news in the Daily Telegraph.
For some reason government scientists like Dr. Jones that get millions in government research grants are considered to be disinterested experts. Yet anyone who has ever taken a dime from an oil company is bought and paid for.
Of course that is nonsense. To politicians, scientists are just another interest group competing for favors. It’s pay to play. To get their grant money scientists need to deliver science that helps argue for bigger government. And they do, especially in the climate sciences.
I still believe that scientists, as someone who has taken an oath to trust in the data and believe in the experimental verification (or falsification) of theories (not literally, of course, but anyone who hasn’t taken such oath in his heart is not a scientist—maybe a mathematician, because they don’t believe the “real world”, where experiments reside in, exist anyway), can ultimately be held to be accountable.
Climate scientists, for all their excesses, eventually have to show result by either successfully predicting the impending doom, or successfully predicting the results of the policies enacted to prevent the doom on the quantitative basis. Either they do that, or in time, they will be ostracized and ridiculed by the rest of the scientific community, as string theorists are.
But I don’t know if this will take place in my lifetime, or during my career in science. It can take a long time for a scientific theory to be properly recognized (just look at things like discovery of prion; there is no political agenda or money involved here, but it took decades for the community to recognize the correct hypothesis). And given that, today, practically all academic scientists have their livelihood held hostage by the government (through NSF or other agencies which fund basic science), some more willingly than others (overwhelming percentage of scientists are tax-and-spend Democrats), I don’t know how long it will take for this change to come. I certainly don’t hold out any hope better than 50-50 that this change will come within my lifetime.
Scientists are people too. They can be influenced by money, and they have been influenced. We need to recognize that. Now the only question is, if this dominance of science by the government and political agenda will continue, leading us to death of science (or rather, hibernation—the truth never dies out, only the people who believe in them) and another dark age, or if we can reverse the trend.