By Joanne Nova on SPPI

The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers, even if you are at the top of your field. What follows is an example of a scientific group that not only stopped a leading researcher from attending a meeting, but then - without discussing the evidence - applauds the IPCC and recommends urgent policies to reduce greenhouse gases. What has science been reduced to if bear biologists feel they can effectively issue ad hoc recommendations on worldwide energy use? How low have standards sunk if informed opinion is censored, while uninformed opinion is elevated to official policy?

If a leading researcher can’t speak his mind without punishment by exile, what chance would any up-and-coming researcher have? As Mitchell Taylor points out “It’s a good way to maintain consensus”. And so it is. But it’s not science. Mitchell Taylor is a Polar Bear researcher who has caught more polar bears and worked on more polar bear groups than any other, but he was effectively ostracized from the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) specifically because he has publicly expressed doubts that there is a crisis due to carbon dioxide emissions.

Dr. Andy Derocher, the outgoing chairman of the PSBG and Professor at the University of Alberta, wrote to inform Taylor that he was not welcome at the 2009 meeting of the PBSG. Keep in mind as you read his comments (below) that Taylor had arranged funding to attend the meeting in Copenhagen, and has been at every meeting of this group since 1981. With 30 years of experience in polar bear research, it goes without saying that he has something to contribute to any discussion about polar bear conservation. This is the original email from Derocher to Taylor explaining why he was not invited:

Hi Mitch,
The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature. I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG. I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears - it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition. Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change. I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.
Best regards,
Andy (Derocher)

So in polar bear research, your opinion on climate change is more important than your knowledge about polar bears. (Time to add Science to the Threatened Species List.) While Mitchell Taylor was ousted, three participants were added to the meeting from groups whose main activities are political lobbying and education rather than science. While the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Polar Bears International (PBI) do fund some minor research, their main output is press releases, rather than scientific papers. Taylor has published some 59 peer reviewed papers. But none of the three new representatives appears to have published a single scientific paper related to polar bears.

If they managed large research programs it would be understandable, but PBI’s budget is apparently barely enough to cover one full time researcher and yet they effectively had three representatives at the PBSG meeting (including Derocher who is a scientific advisor for the PBI).

So there were three spaces for people from institutions whose funds depend on there being a “crisis”, but no space for one of the most published researchers in the field? If Exxon funding is supposed to affect scientists’ announcements, how could we expect “Green” funding from groups who hold a very strong position on climate change not to influence people, or at least to attract job applicants who share their views? Imagine the scandal if Exxon had funded a representative without a single paper to his name and he replaced one of the most experienced in the field?

People assume scientific associations to make pronouncements that mean something, but scientific associations are not scientific so much as political. Committees change. Their decrees are unaudited, and the media do little investigation or critical analysis and mostly just repeat their press releases. One of the few who did note the incident was Christopher Booker. In response, blogger Tim Lambert in (known as “Deltoid") weighed in to give Derocher a chance to answer the critics. So what does Derocher have to say for himself? He comes up with reasonable sounding excuses to justify his actions, but none of them change the original email. His post hoc efforts are just that: post hoc. Worse, they are wrong too. He clutches at straws declaring that Mitchell Taylor is retired - which is evidently news to Mitchell, who has two current contracts, and is a faculty member at Lakehead University with an active teaching program. Taylor has also been out in the field since the last PSBG meeting, and what a “field” it must be. Trekking through snow and looking for predators that weigh half a ton doesn’t sound like much of a hobby for senior citizens.

Read the rest of Joanne’s post here See also here, how the New York Times treats one non-believer within the EPA, Alan Carline, for daring to challenge the so called consensus position. They neglect to print the fact that 30,000 comments were sent in to the EPA endangerment findings also ignored.