Selective Outrage

So, when James Hansen makes a stink about how NASA was supposedly “censoring” his views about global warming, it’s an intolerable abridgement of free, unbiased, and objective scientific inquiry. But when NASA refuses to publish one of its own scientists papers because it doesn’t fit the AGW narrative, well…where’s the outrage?

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference … but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”

It doesn’t matter for this discussion whether Miskolczi is right or wrong…what matters is that the appearance of suppression of free scientific inquiry in this case is being ignored. Were NASA giving the cold shoulder to a paper which appeared to strengthen the pro-AGW case — that is, were the results of the research exactly the opposite — there would be no end to the howls of protest. But in fact, there is very little information on this in the usual news channels.

So…where is the outrage?