Are they being forced to toe the line? Sure looks like it:
I have heard that a number of leading scientists are pretty disgusted with the way Bengtsson has been treated and see the larger issues of concern about the social psychology of our field. People are talking about writing blog posts for professional societies, trying to get signatures on a statement, etc. I hope that these individuals follow through, and that the ‘climate’ for climate research can improve.
This is a very welcome change from the 2009 reactions to Climategate, which reflected most silence, but solidarity with the climate scientists whose emails were made public.
With regards to Pielke Jr’s statement: “anyone who wishes to participate in the public debate on climate change should do so knowing how the politics are played today — dirty, nasty, destructive.” I agree with this statement. As someone participating in the in public debate on climate change, I certainly expect barbs from the media and advocacy groups. What concerns me greatly is other scientists behaving in a dirty, nasty and destructive way, in other words, playing dirty politics with their science.
Can climate scientists please stop the intimidation, bullying, shunning and character assassination of other scientists who they find ‘not helpful’ to their cause? Can we please return to logical refutation of arguments that you disagree with, spiced with a healthy acknowledgement of uncertainties and what we simply don’t know and can’t predict?
Probably not. Not until they suffer some truly adverse consequences for it.
Leftists are very good at tearing things down; not so good at building.
Now they are destroying our trust* in science, which is rather important to our civilization. We’re going to live to regret that.
(* I started to write “faith”, which is actually not inappropriate. It’s important to be able to have faith and trust that scientists are honest and are using the scientific method properly in order to get at the truth, rather than having an ax to grind in pushing a political agenda.)
When has Science ever operated in this way? Science has always been a guild and advancement in the guild has always been based on politics not merit. (As in all other guilds. It’s a human thing.)
That Science occasionally advances is due to the fact that top guild members die and the factional fight for succession sometimes enables new paradigms, (which then become the new orthodoxies). That and the fact that nature sometimes smacks the leading academicians in the face and forces new ideas on them. (Engineers tend to operate nearer this natural corrective tendency and thus faulty paradigms tend to get smacked down pretty quickly.)
Interestingly, while the ideallistic view of science is piously spouted by all sides in the struggle,, whichever side gains control of the discipline immediately starts imposing fatwas on the rest. As I said, it’s a human thing.
What person of reasonable intellect would ever imagine that robust scientific debate could possibly occur in an environment where skeptics are vilified and compared with creationists or holocaust deniers? That environment cannot produce scientific truth, it can only perpetuate and rationalize orthodoxy, which is precisely the route it has been on for the last decade or so. And you can see the inflection point, you can go back and look at the papers on climatology, sea level, and so forth back in the ’80s and see how different things are today.