The Climatically Incorrect

When Barack Obama signed an executive order lifting restrictions on federal funding for EMBRYONIC stem cell research, he said the following:

But let's be clear: Promoting science isn't just about providing resources -- it's also about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient -- especially when it's inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda -- and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

Obama touts the importance of "free and open inquiry" in science.

His supporters applaud him for declaring that science should be walled off from political interference.

If that is the standard we should embrace, why is there a very clear political agenda and intense coercion when it comes to scientific research on the climate?

Patrick McIlheran examines the lunacy of the climate change activists.

He writes:

Anastasios Tsonis is not a lunatic, and no serious person says he is.

He is a scientist, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee whose specialty is climate. He and a colleague say they've figured out why the Earth is cooling.

It has been cooling, since about 2001, and Tsonis and a colleague say temperatures may go on cooling for 10 or 20 more years. Climate, says Tsonis, is heavily affected by a few well-known oscillating systems - El Niño, in the Pacific, is one - and from time to time, four big oscillations synchronize.

When they do, he says, they become coupled, as if synchronized swimmers tried holding hands, and this messes up the dance. There is, then, a sudden shift in trends. If it had been getting hotter, it gets cooler, and vice versa. This happened in 1943, in the 1970s, in 2001, and it will happen again, he says.

Though this doesn't mean humans aren't also pushing temperatures up. The trend "might be on top of something we're doing" with carbon dioxide, he says. Some laymen skeptical about climate Armageddon read too much into his work, says Tsonis.

Willie Soon is not a lunatic, either, nor a "denier," though militants use the word to slander him. He is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The data, he says, show the Earth has been getting warmer - and the data show, further, that this is linked to solar output. Blame our variable sun.

"The sun is not a constant light bulb," he says.

The documentable changes in the energy put out by the sun, the source of almost all the climate's heat, correlate to historical changes in climate, say Soon and some other solar scientists. The sun's effects easily overwhelm the small role carbon dioxide might play, argues Soon.

This lands Soon on Greenpeace's "deniers" list, an online roll of scientists who expressed impermissible thoughts and who must not be listened to. It's part of what disgusts Soon about climate politics these days: The reality of scientists' findings has become secondary to their usefulness. Now, he says, "it is always the answer first." Data will be regarded only if they get you to that right answer.

This "deniers" list is akin to a blacklist.

Reputations of scientists are sullied for simply reporting their findings that don't fit the political agenda of the climate change activists.

This isn't science. Where's all the free and open inquiry hailed by Obama? Where's the protection from political interference for these scientists?

The notion that only "climatically correct" findings will be considered valid is an attack on science. In fact, such politically influenced findings aren't scientific at all.

The chilling nature of the oppression that some scientists are enduring goes beyond their experience within the scientific community.

We all are affected by the manipulation of the activists.

The effort to silence those who are "climatically incorrect" has no place in a free society.

As Obama said, scientists must be able to do their jobs "free from manipulation or coercion."

And we have the right and the obligation to listen "to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient -- especially when it's inconvenient."

I agree with Obama that we must ensure that "scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda -- and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."