Why Government Should Get Out of the Conduct, Funding and Administration of Science

This cartoon by Josh neatly explains how the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) misled delegates to the 2015 Paris Climate conference at which international agreement was reached to invest trillions on measures to resist climate warming. Specifically, NOAA used unverified and untrustworthy data to claim that the widely reported pause in climate warming since the Year 2000 did not, in fact, occur.

How the lie was told is detailed in this blog post by Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Not surprisingly, the Obama White House and Obama's science adviser, John Holdren had a part to play in the fraud.

Having worked as a scientist, briefly, for three governments, and having held academic appointments, briefly, at three universities, I can state on the basis of extensive experience, that the manipulation of evidence by NOAA does not reflect abnormal behavior in the management of science and science funding by government agencies. On the contrary, governments control science mainly for the purpose of controlling the message. For research that is economically productive and discoveries that are profound, scientific research needs to be well protected from government interference, oversight, and control.