Purge

Nicolai Vavilov was a Soviet botanist and geneticist who made major advances in improving cereal grains in the USSR.  With the famines brought on by Stalin's forced collectivization and oppression of the Ukraine, improved agricultural stock was desperately needed.

Unfortunately, he got on the wrong side of Stalin's pet botanist, Trofim Lysenko.  Vavilov was arrested in 1940 - his mug shot is shown here.  He died of starvation in a Gulag three years later.

For him, the science was settled, in a very real and legally binding sense.  Good thing that purges of unpopular or inconvenient scientists would never happen today.  Oh, wait:

It has been brought to my attention that as a result of all the hoopla over our paper published in Remote Sensing recently, that the Editor-in-Chief, Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned. His editorial explaining his decision appears here.

The paper that he published in Remote Sensing was about how the climate feedbacks as stated by the IPCC are very likely wrong.  This was in fact one of the reasons that I called out to be skeptical of the whole Global Warming theory.

What's interesting about this is that Dr. Spencer's paper has not been retracted byRemote Sensing, or by Dr. Spencer (who stands by the paper).  However, former Editor-in-Chief Wagner finds himself purged.  Spencer comments:

I’m also told that RetractionWatch has a new post on the subject. Their reporter told me this morning that this was highly unusual, to have an editor-in-chief resign over a paper that was not retracted.

Quite frankly, the whole situation stinks of a massively politicized cover-up.  This isn't the first time this has happened, either; an early Photoshop mocking the situation mentioned how the former editor of Geophysical Research Letters found himself purged in a similar situation:

If the shoe were on the other foot, this would be considered the scientific scandal of the century.  In fact, we see much more minor interference (Stem Cell funding, Evolution) blown up into "The Republican War On Science".

Note to the Press: name me one person who's lost their job from this "Republican War On Science".  Get back to me on that when you find out.

And so the message goes out to the Scientific community, that dissent from the politically approved view will not be tolerated.  Step out of line, and you'll find yourself with Comrades Wagner and Vavilov.  You might say that the hypothesis that the scientific process self-corrects has been falsified.

Can every Progressive who ever went on about the "Republican War On Science" please shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grown ups are talking.