If the US government ran the scientific community, that community would not have its strong consensus on climate change, because half of congress, and every oth

If the US government ran the scientific community, that community would not have its strong consensus on climate change, because half of congress, and every other president, is committed to at least equivocating on whether that consensus exists. You fail to realize how the USG operates. Elected officials are not the ones in charge: http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employment/ http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employm... Congress and the President could not turn off the climate science machine or even redirect it, even if they wanted to. Sure, their signatures are scribbled underneath its annual funding. That doesn't mean they have actual power over it. I'm afraid the link you posted does not cast Chris de Freitas in a positive light. If I knew of sloppy science that had been passed through peer review, I'd expect the person responsible to be excoriated, much more so if that work contradicted my own. This would not make me wrong, or the editor in question some kind of victim. It sure doesn't! That's because the emails are written by his enemies - who are in the process of purging him. Here's some context, if you're comfortable reading "deniers:" http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/27/the-tribalistic-corruption-of-peer-review-the-chris-de-freitas-incident/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/27/the-tribalistic-corrup... If the "scientific community" was a bazaar, de Freitas' enemies would not have the power to purge him. It's a cathedral, though, so they do (and did). The trouble with the idea that climate science has fallen victim to a grand counterfactual groupthink (if you don't like the 'c' word) is that the numbers, the physics, and the reasoned opinions of the vast majority of apolitical observers support the climate consensus. You have considerable confidence in your ability, I see, to identify an "apolitical" observer. (Everyone wants to be apolitical these days - it's as if they didn't believe in democracy, or something.) The normal meaning of "apolitical" is "bureaucratic" - see above. You also may not be talking to the same physicists as me. What I've heard is that there's a lot of concern about being bureaucratically identified with this scam. But no point in coming out against it, except to ruin your career. It's true that the physics of the greenhouse effect per se are valid - though I'd lay even odds that no one's informed you that CO2 forcing is O(log n). There is a considerable distance between this and believing that climate models have any predictive power, which IMHO is prima facie absurd. Here's a brief discussion of why: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not... The author is a denier, I'll admit (or he wouldn't be posting on a denier blog), but he's also a physics professor at Duke. As for Soviet science: did the Soviet Union promulgate any kind of false science that you're aware of? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko