We all remember the climate crisis a couple of years ago - leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University showed that climate scientists conspired to manipulate some data, suppress some data, and only promote the results that supported the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Rather than this being a one-time event or an outlier, it now appears that suppressing the truth to minimize the damage to the orthodoxy is par for the course.

This week's example comes from Georgia Tech, where climate professor Judith Curry reports that a colleague was encouraged by three other scientists not to publish studies that would "only provide fodder to the skeptics":

One of my colleagues was thinking about publishing a paper that challenges the IPCC interpretation of the previous pause during the 1940s to 1970′s. My colleague sent a .ppt presentation on this topic to three colleagues, each of whom is a very respected senior scientist and none of whom have been particularly vocal advocates on the subject of climate change (names are withheld to protect the guilty/innocent). Each of these scientists strongly encouraged my colleague NOT to publish this paper, since it would only provide fodder for the skeptics.

Maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. After all, this is the same group of respected members of the scientific community that makes claims that 97% of the community agrees with the theory of climate change - the only problem being that they seem to have sort of made the whole thing up. James M. Taylor reports at the Heartland Institute:

Global warming alarmist John Cook, founder of the misleadingly named blog site Skeptical Science, published a paper with several other global warming alarmists claiming they reviewed nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. Cook reported that he and his colleagues found that 97 percent of the papers that expressed a position on human-caused global warming “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” As is the case with other ‘surveys’ alleging an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, the question surveyed had absolutely nothing to do with the issues of contentious between global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics. The question Cook and his alarmist colleagues surveyed was simply whether humans have caused some global warming. The question is meaningless regarding the global warming debate because most skeptics as well as most alarmists believe humans have caused some global warming. The issue of contention dividing alarmists and skeptics is whether humans are causing global warming of such negative severity as to constitute a crisis demanding concerted action.

Cook's study also misclassified several studies as taking no position, and removed them overall from the report so as not to affect the 97% claim.

So for science that is settled by an overwhelming consensus of scientists dedicated to the truth, there sure is a lot of manipulation going on. It shouldn't take this much reminding for professional scientists about the true meaning of the scientific method, but I'll say it again: The scientific method fits the theory to the observed facts - NOT the other way around.