The Assault On Science, Part 2

As I mentioned on Sunday, the whole point of the Winger whining on "Climategate" is not to debunk global climate change as a hoax, but to discredit modern science as a whole, and to bully the scientific community into doing only the science that the Wingers approve of.  This ranges from ignoring anything that might hurt corporate profits all the way up to science itself being heretic and bereft of any morality and use.  Scientists are overwhelmingly not Republicans, after all...and it's time the Teabaggers brought them in line, you see.

Enter Daniel Henninger at...surprise!...the Wall Street Journal. (emphasis mine)

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

(More after the jump...)

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

You understand what's going on?  All these egghead scientists believe in, well, science.  They're overwhelmingly not good little conservative Republicans as a whole, so they cannot be trusted.  Ergo, when a bunch of emails at one university show up where these scientists have a debate about climate change data, it suddenly becomes the Greatest Scientific Scandal Of All Time And Science Is Now Wrong.  See how Henninger cajoles with the scientific community he writes to?  "You don't want to go down as a loser scientist liberal, do you?  Because we're coming for you now."
You see, the fact that scientists consider themselves to be Democrats or worse...liberals...isn't a function of them being scientists, it's a function of them all having a massive political agenda to defraud the world and hurt our precious Corporate Profits.  Remember, in the Wingerverse, everything is political.  So scientists, being overwhelmingly liberal in thought, must have a massive conspiratorial political agenda.

Never mind that for years under Bush, science was as politicized as possible. Let's not forget that dozens of times, the results of science were then politically interpreted as favorably to the Bush agenda as possible.  Entire agencies were co-opted to change data to fit the results the Bush White House and the various executive agencies it controlled demanded.  Scientists who gainsaid these results were cut off from federal money and shunned from grants and other funding.  The Bush White House called the shots for federal agencies and for funding for university level research grants.

Naturally, the Wingers believe that everything works the way they operate, so that global warming must be the same type of massive operation, only controlled by those evil George Soros funded liberals.  This article is not the first attempt to bully scientists into fearing the Teabagger lunatics, and it won't be the last.  The folks with the agenda here are the ones putting out op-ed articles like this, not the scientists.

One group of spats at a university is proof of a massive worldwide conspiracy that also manages to actually melt the ice.  Must be George Soros' hidden lasers, right?