First the Mainstream Media, Now Mainstream Science?

This blog, as well as many other conservative sources, has documented the shameful antics of the mainstream media. Focusing only on certain congressional races, demeaning conservatives through personal attacks, only presenting one side of the issues is a fait accompli for many news organizations. Books like Bias by Bernard Goldberg even show insider views and egregious examples from such respected networks as CBS, CNN, etc.

Some liberals describe conservatives as fossils that must sink their head in the sand to avoid the reality as reported by the media. Several books have been written maintaining that conservatives rejection of the media as well as modern science shows that they are doomed to die an ignoble death at the hands of present truths.

The greatest example of this supposed rejection of modern science is conservative's contention that global warming is not man-made and not as significant as advertised. The science is settled and the consensus has been reached, we are told. Anyone who does not believe in global warming is a flat-earther and worse than that, maybe even dangerous. Ellen Goodman stated that global warming deniers are on par with Holocaust deniers. Al Gore maintains fighting global warming is a moral issue.

To mock the media is one thing, polls have shown that people trust the media only marginally more than politicians or lawyers. Many even recognize a leftward tilt. Scientists, however, deal with hard facts; reproducible data that are peer-reviewed and rigorously tested. They do not editorialize, they objectively interpret the data. We recognize the wiggle room in journalism and deny any in science. Certainly this is a positive view of science because this is what true science should be.

Unfortunately, global warming scientists seem to have fallen far short of the gold standard that the American people believed them to adhere to. The UK Telegraph reports on the 61 megabytes of data that were stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released by a hacker to the media. Private E-mails between scientists and the full spectrum of data suggests no less than a ideological agenda that was put above all dissenting evidence.

The Telegraph charges that examples of manipulation of evidence, suppression of evidence, fantasies of violence against warming deniers, attempts to deny the Medieval Warming Period, and squeezing dissenting scientists out of the peer review process are all present. The scientists even privately acknowledged being in a cooling trend while issuing press releases of continuous warming.

Climategate, as this scandal has been dubbed by many news outlets, threatens to relegate science to the same dubious position the media has occupied for the past several decades. This is an absolute shame for anyone who believes in the idea of ascertaining objective truth through the scientific method.