Where are they now?

Paul Ehrlich is famous in these parts for two things. First, for his work back in the 70s that scared the beejeezus out us as his doom and gloom end-of-days predictions from his books like The Population Bomb showed up in our elementary school-issued Weekly Readers.

Class, after your coloring assignment please turn to page 5 where we will read about how the planet will experience mass starvation killing hundreds of millions of people by 1995 because of overcrowding.

The second element of his fame is far less noteworthy everywhere else except in BwD Nation. Paul Ehrlich deserves special recognition because of how wrong he was in every single one of his predictions. Not just wrong but spectacularly wrong… fantastically and stupendously wrong. ALL CAPS and bold-faced wrong. A-person-could-write-a-book-about-how-wrong-Ehrlich-was wrong.

In fact, Paul Ehrlich was wrong to the magnitude and degree that what resulted was not being discredited but rather achieving a tenured position in the biology department at the University of Stanford.

That’s how wrong Ehrlich was.

So, of course, it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots and discover that Ehrlich is currently one of the high priests of the faith-based AGW cult which is once again back in the news but in this instance, not for data dumping, data fudging, decline-hiding or any outright lying on the subject of global warming but for going on the offensive and attacking those people that would have the temerity to question the rather un-scientific methods executed to date by the faith-based AGW crowd.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

"Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.

The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body on the matter, has suffered defections of members after it had to retract claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt over the next 25 years.

It’s a crazy thought, we know, but perhaps instead of wasting time, energy and resources in discrediting their skeptics, they should stick to being scientists and practice their craft in a straight-up non-partisan manner. Then again, that really hasn’t been their strong suit as the last few months have revealed so this response is entirely predictable.

And speaking of resources, a good chunk of the money that will be going towards this partisan attack is your tax dollars

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and a chief skeptic of global-warming claims, is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants falsified data. He lists 17 people he said have been key players in the controversy.

Cue the outrage from our slopping-at-the-public-trough and put-upon scientists:

That news has enraged scientists. Mr. Schneider said Mr. Inhofe is showing "McCarthyesque" behavior in the mold of the Cold War-era senator who was accused of stifling political debate through accusations of communism.

Cry us a river. The time for debate really is over. Any credibility once possessed by the Paul Ehrlichs and Phil Jones and the rest of the miserable grant-seeking and tax-payer soaking AGW cultists is gone and gone forever. There is no going back – nothing these hacks will ever say again can be trusted.

The climate change scientific community needs to start completely from scratch and the first step is to clean house of every single last one of these alarmists. Get some new blood into these acadamies and universities that don’t have the taint of these scandals and then maybe we can start having a discussion again about man-made global warming. ‘Til that happens, though, please don’t bother us.

H/T: Hot Air