who's "anti-science" now?

Man, this just kills me. It always has irritated me to hear liberals and Democrats calling Republicans "anti-science". Well, here in a piece by Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal is the story of EPA official Alan Carlin who had the temerity to come out with a report that showed that global temperatures in the last few years have, in fact, been on a downward trend, and his report also pointed out some of the problems with the modeling on which much of the global warming hysteria is based. So EPA administrator Lisa Jackson buries the report and tells Carlin to shut up basically. What's worse, when Carlin didn't shut up the lib smear team went into action. As Strassel writes:

"Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where's Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?"

The "Mr. Hansen" that Strassel refers to is Jim Hansen, the NASA official who made a name for himself by claiming that the Bush administration tried to "silence" him.

Strassel has a very effective last paragraph too:

"Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition."

So who's "anti-science" now?