Climategate

In a thoughtful piece on Climategate, John Tierney observes that: "Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians."

It's a very apt analogy. Just as priests have a vested financial interest in promoting doubt-free belief in their gods, so to do the climate scientists. Bret Stephens WSJ op-ed is a must read on this point:

All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Please go read the whole thing.