The Inquisition begins

Are you the head of a polluting oil company? Do you wish that all those annoying scientists nattering on about global warming would just shut thye hell up so you could get back to figuring out which tax-free offshore subsidiary you're gonna use to launder that embarrassing surplus of money you're pulling from $2.35-a-gallon gasoline prices?

Simple! Just have your man in Washington use public tax money to bully them into silence.

As every good Republican knows, the truth is what the CEO says it is. Who do those derned lib'rul scientists think they are?!? M'gosh, you'd think they believed in freedom of speech and the rest of the First Amendment, just like all them other Amurrica-hatin', Democrat-votin' terrists!

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In a sign of how climate science has grown increasingly political, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce is investigating three professors whose work suggests that the earth's climate is warmer now than at any time in many centuries and that increasing levels of greenhouse gases from burning fossils fuels are largely to blame.

In letters to the three scientists last week, Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, demanded detailed documentation about the hundreds of studies on which they were an author or co-author. Mr. Barton also sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation that requests information about the work of the three professors, as well as a list of all grants and awards in the area of climate and paleoclimate science, which number 2,700 in the past 10 years....

... Mr. Barton worked in the oil-and-gas industry before being elected to Congress, in 1984. In the past decade, he has consistently ranked as one of the top five recipients of campaign contributions from that industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks money in politics....

The letters in question, in which Joe Barton (R-Oil Industry) demands vast amounts of personal and financial information about specific global-warming researchers who fail to agree with the oil industry, can be read here. No word on whether Mr. Barton has demanded this type of information about, say, Patrick J. Michaels.