Vested Interests Are The Enemy Of Science

In my 11/20/09 article titled The New Scientific Method: Remove The Data That Doesn't Support My Theories I talked about what is now being called "Climategate". The purposeful effort by climate change scientists to alter the data to suppport their preconceived theory.

This scandal is not going away, at least not in the blogosphere (you won't read anything about it in the main stream media), and I finally read a great article in the Wall Street Journal titled Climategate: Follow The Money. In that article (read it, it's short and to the point) was this fantastic quote regarding the organizations that receive ever increasing grants to study climate change because those very same organizations keep ringing the warning bell of climate change ever louder:

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Emphasis mine. I couldn't have said it better.