By James Lewis, American Thinker

Scientists like money. (It’s true --- be still, my heart.) Big Science is a Big Business, supporting nearly half the budgets of our major universities. Science professors are only hired if they can swing enough Federal grant money to pay for their labs, hire a gaggle of graduate assistants, and let the universities skim up to forty percent off the top for overhead. And besides, it’s nice to get fat salaries. So the professional scientist union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has ads headed AAA$. They aren’t shy about it.``The trouble is that money means politics, and politics means shading the truth. As a result, we get politicized science, which corrupts real science. Any kind of Politically Incorrect science therefore becomes very hard to publish. So the cult of PC has invaded the pristine halls of science.

The past week’s Science magazine is a study in the way science can be ruined. The scare cover shouts Reef TROUBLE, to support the idea that our coral reefs are dying. It’s like the National Enquirer. Donald A. Kennedy is the editor of Science, with a dubious reputation from his years as president of Stanford University. Turns out that President Kennedy spent millions of Stanford research funds to rebuild his personal residence; “feathering your own nest” is more than a metaphor at Stanford. The scandal led to his resignation. Fortunately Kennedy did not end up on the bread line. He was able to jump to become editor-in-chief of the flagship journal of the AAAS, Science magazine.

In the last issue of Science Donald Kennedy has an editorial endorsing the Democrat candidate for president. Not exactly in so many words, but it’s unmistakable. No doubt Kennedy is a fire-breathing liberal. But he’s also hoping for lots of global warming money from Hillary or Obama. (For a good cause, of course. Perhaps his roof needs repairs).
Read more here.

Update: Note this New York Times Story from January 24, 1991 on how Stanford University said that it would refund about half a million dollars of Government research money used for the upkeep of university-owned homes for the university’s president, Donald Kennedy, and two other administrators.

Noted on a more positive and encouraging note, Donald Kennedy, announced earlier this year that he would be retiring. Kennedy has served as editor-in-chief since 2000. Bruce Alberts, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and president emeritus of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has been named the next editor-in-chief of Science. A prominent cell biologist best known for his work on the protein complexes that allow chromosomes to be replicated, Alberts has focused in recent years on public issues, especially the improvement of science education. Alberts, 69, earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1965 will take over the editorship on 1 March 2008.

Investors Business Daily

Climate Change: A Senate minority report lists 400 reputable scientists who think the only melting ice we should really fear was in the cocktail glasses of attendees at the recent global warming conference in Bali.

Many of the 400 scientists have taken part in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose climate change reports tout consensus but which critics charge are heavily edited to support pre-defined conclusions. Among the IPCC’s warming “deniers” is atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former research director at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute. “I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting—a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number—entirely without merit,” he said. “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: Just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Physicist John W. Brosnahan, who develops remote-sensing tools for clients like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says: “Of course I believe in global warming, and in global cooling—all part of the natural climate changes that the Earth has experienced for billions of years, caused primarily by cyclical variations in solar output.” Brosnahan says he has “not seen any sort of definitive, scientific link to man-made carbon dioxide as the root cause of global warming, only incomplete computer models that suggest that this might be the case.” Those models, he says, leave out too many variables. Read more here.

By Melanie Phillips, UK Spectator

But now the cavalry appears at last to have arrived. According to this story, a US Senate report documents the opinion of hundreds of prominent scientists from around the world who say global warming and cooling is a cycle of nature and cannot legitimately be connected to man’s activities.

The report compiled observations from more than 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen nations who have voiced objections to the so-called ‘consensus’ on ‘man-made global warming.’ Many of the scientists are current or former participants in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose present officials, along with former Vice President Al Gore, have asserted a definite connection. The new report comes from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s office of the GOP ranking member, and cites the hundreds of opinions issued just in 2007 that global warming and man’s activities are unrelated.

Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust”, the introduction said. And there probably would be many more scientists making such statements, were it not for the fear of retaliation from those aboard the global-warming-is-caused-by-SUVs bandwagon, the report said. And it details some of this intimidation. Looks like man-made global warming theory is melting away faster than you can say Al Gore. A lot of reputations are now going to disappear along with it: all those who were part of the famous ‘consensus’ (not). Those people should never be taken seriously again. It’s over, guys. Reason, truth and real science are fighting back. Read more here.