Science corrupted: Peer reviewers suppress a scientific paper coauthored by a highly distinguished scientist for political reasons, reported in Friday’s London Times. The East Anglia scandal in 2009 demonstrated not just fraud in the climate science community, but also dysfunction in the peer review process in climate science. Now we’re seeing evidence that the corruption has gone unabated. “Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of the authors of the study, said… ‘The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist.'”

Roy Spencer has some thoughts on a closely-related controversy involving Bengtsson here. Perhaps encouraged by the record of the past 17 years, which shows no warming in global temperatures despite drastic predictions from the mainstream models based on CO2 forcings, the public is becoming increasingly suspicious of climate science. Unfortunately, the media (including local weather reporters) has not quite caught on. Spencer: “As I have always said, if you fund scientists to find evidence of something, they will be happy to find it for you.”

Steve McIntyre discusses the Bengtsson case here. It is a reflection of a widespread effort at thought-cleansing in the mainstream climate science community.