The new and improved scientific method

Scientists threatened for 'climate denial' | Uk News | News | Telegraph :

"'Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,' said the professor [Timothy Ball, University of Winnipeg].

"'I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.'"

The article deals with personal villification and even death threats received by Prof. Ball and others who are outspoken critics of the official AGW doctrine. Science is supposed to make progress by experiments, observations, facts and logic. It cannot advance true understanding by means of lies, slander and violence.

A half century after he coined the term, people keep dredging up President Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning about the danger of power concentrated in the "military industrial complex" - and rightly so. But they almost never cite the next section of that same speech in which he warned of the danger of the scientific academic complex.

Eisenhower, himself a former president of Columbia University, thought it almost as dangerous to have too much power over science and scholarship concentrated in a few hands. This has come to pass where so much of academic research is dependent on financing from a governments and a few mega-foundations marching to the beat of a single, politically correct drummer. As the article quotes a former editor of New Scientist magazine, "Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."