We Have Always Been at Warm With Eastasia

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto. 

We Have Always Been at Warm With Eastasia
‘The federal government has suspended a wildlife biologist whose sightings of dead polar bears in Arctic waters became a rallying point for campaigners seeking to blunt the impact of global warming,” the New York Times reports:

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement notified the biologist, Charles Monnett, on July 18 that he had been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation into “integrity issues,” according to a copy of a letter posted online by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. . . .

Transcripts of an interview with Dr. Monnett posted online by the public employees group indicate that the bureau’s inspector general is focusing on calculations that Dr. Monnett made to estimate a 75 percent mortality rate among bears caught in a mid-September storm in the open sea.

Aside from the order to take administrative leave, no other documents have been made available specifying the accusations against Dr. Monnett. But a transcript of a Feb. 23 interview of Dr. Monnett by two special agents for the bureau’s inspector general, posted online by the employees group, indicates that they questioned him about a contention in the 2006 report that no dead bears had been seen in aerial surveys for 17 years before the 2004 sighting.

Meanwhile, Forbes reports that “NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted:

The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Meanwhile, Nature, which styles itself a scientific journal, has devoted “two pages” to what it calls the “absurdities” of a Heartland Institute conference questioning global warming:

Does the following sound familiar? “They distort science, ignore reality and will not tolerate opinions or facts that conflict with their beliefs.” “Cynical manipulators or simple pawns, their purpose is only to keep funds flowing to a corrupt few who profit from the status quo.” Those are the kinds of words scientists use, often correctly, to describe the sceptics, many of whom would have the financial interests of today continue their dominance tomorrow. Yet this is also how sceptics characterize climate scientists, whose careers and reputations they claim are intertwined with protecting the science of anthropogenic global warming.

To address this conflict might be seen as lending respectability to the spurious claims made by sceptics against respected scientists and robust science.

In reality, the scientific method is all about skepticism. Still, the global-warming consensus looks highly robust if you ignore the evidence, the behavior of global warmists, and the nature of science.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below ”Today’s Columnists.

(NOTE:  James Taranto is on vacation.  The excerpt above is from the 7/29/11 BOTW Archives.)