the real and perceived dependence of science on government

The perspective of an academic economist from the Austrian School of Thought: William Anderson at LewRockwell.com on ClimateGate...

...what happens when the political process completely hijacks science.

As an Austrian economist, I don’t worship at the feet of the “scientific community,” in large part because the “scientific community” is able to engage in trickery but defend its actions in the name of “preserving science.”

Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged “acid rain” problems and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA) had wanted to see....

Anyone who was familiar with the history of climate is familiar with the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago, as well as the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling that lasted from the mid-1500s to the late 1800s....[recent "global warming"] could not have been caused by human activity.

Obviously, this was of huge concern to those who claim that people are causing the changes in temperature, so the “scientists” simply made the Medieval Warm Period disappear by tricking the data. In 1999, three scientists, including Mann, published a paper which showed average global temperatures to be relatively steady for thousands of years, but suddenly shooting up in the last few decades, a “hockey stick” approach....

Austrian economists are quite familiar with the drill here. First, the advocates of a position, be it mainstream economics or human-caused climate change, make sure that no dissenting papers can be published. Second, after having successfully shut out the opposition, they claim that the theories of the Austrians or dissenters “fail the market test” because their views don’t appear in the mainstream literature. The logic is circular, but it sure appeals to the True Believers...

This is the same New York Times that gleefully published illegal leaks from federal prosecutors in the Michael Milken and Martha Stewart cases, which meant that the newspaper was aiding and abetting the commission of real felonies....