Hunting Witches (scientist persecution editorial in the WaPo)

[Caution]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/22/AR2005072201658.html

Hunting Witches

Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A16

"THIS IS HIGHLY usual," declared a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when asked this week whether the request by committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for information from three climate scientists was out of the ordinary. He and his boss are alone in that view. Many scientists and some of Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee, has called the investigation "misguided and illegitimate." Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, one of the targets, calls it "intrusive, far-reaching and intimidating." Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that although scientists "are used to answering really hard questions," in his 22 years as a government scientist he never heard of a similar inquiry, which he suspects could "have a chilling effect on the willingness of people to work in areas that are politically relevant."


Mr. Barton's attempt to dismiss all this as turf-battling on the part of Mr. Boehlert, like his spokesman's claim that such demands for data are normal, is disingenuous. While the Energy and Commerce Committee does sometimes ask for raw data when it looks at regulatory decisions or particular government technology purchases, there is no precedent for congressional intervention in a scientific debate. As Mr. Bradley pointed out in his response to Mr. Barton, scientific progress is incremental: "We publish a paper, and others may point out why its conclusions or methods might be wrong. We publish the results of additional studies . . . as time goes on robust results generally become accepted." Science moves forward following these "well-established procedures," and not through the intervention of a congressional committee that is partial to one side of the argument.

<Snip>

[SteppingRazor]

1. Amazing, isn't it?

That we've come centuries since the Salem Witch Trials, and yet the benighted religio-crazies have only evolved so far as to go from burning so-called "witches" to eviscerating scientists. Perhaps one has to give them credit. Witches, after all, are an easy target. Trying to destroy what is commonly accepted as basic science takes an entirely different level of chutzpah

[hobbit709]

2. Let's tell Barton

that we need all this information from him to see if he's qualified to do his job.

[Lerkfish]

3. HERETICS! Purge them! flog them at the stake! burn them!

(sarcasm)

[ironman202]

4. do you know what the word "heretic" means in Greek?

One who questions.

[Lerkfish]

8. excellent.

good to know.

[wli]

5. eppur si muove!

Next they'll be telling us the earth is flat, when the ancients themselves had already figured out it was a sphere (okay, oblate spheroid). Actually, I remember hearing rumors of heliocentrism in antiquity (esp. India). Does anyone know about that?

[hobbit709]

6. One of the old Greek philosophers

estimated the size of the Earth and wasn't that far off. He knew it was round.

[SteppingRazor]

7. Eritosthenes measured the Earth, Parmenodes noted that it's round

Parmenides was before Eritosthenes, and based his assumption off the simple observation that, during an eclipse of the moon, the Earth's shadow was round, and the horizon had curviture.

Based on that, Eritosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth using a simple experiment involving two pillars and their shadows that can be reproduced today by schoolchildren. Real simple stuff. Of course, it's one thing to reproduce things. It's quite another to think them up in the first place. I understand Einstein's Theory of Relativity, both special and general, but that doesn't mean I could think it up.

On edit: corrected many spelling errors

[wli]

9. my understanding of Permenodes

My understanding is that he wrote about it, but it was considered a common observation simply from watching things fall below the horizon in all directions.

[SteppingRazor]

10. You could be 100% right.

I'm only throwing out what little I know. :)