Years ago I had a battle with the American Geophysical Union. They wanted to support some piece of legislation in Congress, and so they came up with a statement that said their members were pro-Darwin, anti-Creation scientists. Or something like that.

Trouble was, I was neither. Nor did I see what truck biology had with an outfit that published scientific journals in geology and space physics. Space Physics? Yeah, you see, space plasma physics was an orphan soon after being born. James Van Allen had a geiger tube he put on one of the first American space rockets after Sputnik. We had tried to launch before the Russians, but the Naval Research Lab couldn't build a rocket that worked, and Werner von Braun was finally asked to send up his Jupiter-C rocket. Van Allen hedged his bets, and made his experiment compatible with either the Navy's Vanguard or the Army's Jupiter. So when the call came from Huntsville, Van Allen was ready to go, and discovered, as his graduate student exclaimed, "My God, space is radioactive!"

Well that took satellites to measure, and satellites were the speciality of the newly created NASA, which was run by engineers like Von Braun, not scientists. Up until Van Allen, the fellows studying space were either cosmic ray/neutron scientists, who had big massive lead plates and geiger counters, or the radio scientist/engineers who listened to whistlers and talked about F2 layers of the ionosphere. But neither group really knew what was happening in the environment between the ionosophere and the Sun, in what became the provenance of Space Plasma Physics. Van Allen was a cosmic ray guy, but he quickly switched gears to make small, light instruments that could fit on satellites to measure this unexplored region. His compatriots at the University of Chicago, however, couldn't leave their lead plates and neutron monitors behind. So when it came time to give scientific talks, the gatekeepers at UC kept Van Allen out of the American Physical Society meetings that they organized. Van Allen responded by moving his growing group of satellite experimentalists to the American Geophysical Union, where they have remained ever since.

In my graduate school days I became a member of the AGU, and timidly attended the meetings full of big shots from Berkeley, MIT, Johns Hopkins APL or the University of Iowa. I'll never forget my first presentation, where I had analyzed some satellite data of the radiation belts and the same graduate student who had worked for Van Allen and who had discovered the radiation belts 25 years previously, asked me the question of the origin of the radiation belts. I stammered out a response, but even now, 25 years later, I still don't know the answer to his question. Or more precisely, I think I know the answer, but my papers have been rejected by the AGU journals for straying too far from the accepted wisdom.

For even back then, the AGU was concerned with consensus, with respectability, with politics. It has only gotten worse over the years. When I was a member I used to get their in-house rag, "Eos", which I read cover-to-cover. The back page had all the job offers, separated by community, and I would peruse the Space Physics column eagerly. One week, Eos declared that global warming was too important a topic to be left to scientists, that we all needed to accept it for its political "truth". It was a declaration of war on modernism by the post-modern editors of Eos, and it happened some 15 years ago.

When AGU decided to get into the battle for Darwinism a few years later, I had already seen the hand writing on the wall. The organization was doomed, and I cancelled my $30 a year membership. AGU responded by raising my registration fee for the annual conference by $150 for "non-members". That's when I stopped attending the meetings and reading Eos. Then when my journal articles on the origin of the radiation belts began to be rejected by editors who never read them--a result of contradicting a proposed NASA mission as I later discovered--then I also stopped reading the journals. Whatever the organization had become, I decided, was not worth the high blood pressure fighting.

It also meant, as I discovered to my chagrin, that it made me practically ineligible for NASA grants, because the reviewers relied heavily on AGU journals for evaluation. Politics, grant money, publications--slowly the whole academic-government-complex became revealed for the incestuous monster it had become. Space Science had compromised in order to have access to funding, and like Nietzsche, the diseases it contracted from the relationship were driving it mad.

So it was to my utter surprise that the staid, don't-rock-the-boat, politically savvy AGU made the news this week. Apparently the chair of AGU's "Task force for Scientific Ethics", a certain Peter Gleick,  was caught doing several scientifically inethical things.
  1. He misrepresented himself to obtain sensitive documents from a lobbyist group that he subsequently posted.
  2. He forged a "memo" that made rhetorical points the documents didn't, and released it with the cache.
  3. He fed a feeding frenzy at the NYT, the CSM, and other leading newsmedia concerning said memo.
  4. When the sophomoric nature of the memo was revealed, and his identity discovered, he "confessed" at the Huffington Post that the memo was "fake but accurate" and was forced upon him by the lobbyist group's refusal to dialogue--when in fact, he had turned down an invitation from them the previous week.

When all this hit the fan, AGU quietly removed him as chair, as this link now shows. It's a bit reminiscent of the NYT's "ethicist" Randy Cohen, who was caught making donations to a political party despite the conditions on his employment forbidding it, and the parody printed at NRO is priceless. So who is going to parody the AGU "ethics" panel?

No one.

You see, the NYT was in the business of selling newspapers, but the AGU is in the business of distributing NASA grants. You can parody an institution that people hire, but you don't parody an institution that bought your lunch. And dinner. And career.

More's the pity. Because if the AGU had any inkling of how ridiculous they have become as cheerleaders of global warming, if they had any idea how vacuous and irrelevant they are making themselves over Darwinism, they would have disbanded their "ethics panel" years ago. It is only when we take ourselves too seriously. It is only when hubris damages our vision of the truth that we are capable of such enormous and self-inflicted wounds. That's why kings used to keep a jester in the court, to say the things that no one else had courage to say. Let me then take the role of court jester, and say what your faithful members would say if they could.

That was damned silly thing to do! For shame! Disband the entire ethics panel. And while you're at it, drop the "Climate Communication Prize" aka the Global Warmist Propaganda incentive. It's embarrassing you. Stick to science, it is after all, what your members do for a living.

Oh, and one more thing.

Let non-members come for free--the meetings aren't going to exactly mobbed--and charge the presenters. That should make meeting shorter, and you can post all the posters on the web anyway. That way everyone can spend more time on science and less on travel. It's win-win. If you want to see how it works, come to the big SPIE meeting in August--but come early, the good part lasts only 3 days.