It is beginning to look more and more like the frenzied effort at damage control in the wake of revelations of questionable scientific practices regarding climate change is failing.  Even the MSM (in this case CBS) is reporting on the apparent conflicts of interest amongst leading proponents of AGW who are receiving millions in grants and government funding that would be at risk should another cause of the recent warming trend be discovered.

As the science scandal known as ClimateGate grows, the largest U.S. physicists’ association is finding itself roiled by internal dissent and allegations of conflict of interest over a forthcoming review of its position statement on man-made global warming.

“It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming,” says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.

Petr Chylek, a fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University, said in an open letter that climate scientists “have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view.” And 141 scientists have signed a statement at CopenhagenClimateChallenge.org that says actual evidence of human-caused global warming is lacking and “unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.”

The point I’d like to emphasize is that questioning the scientific methods and integrity of AGW proponents does not make you a climate change heretic skeptic.  And although the zealots for global warming want the rest of us to “shut the hell up”, true science demands that the inquiry continue.