Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser. To be perfectly honest, I can't defend anything about any of that. For one, none of it is about the scientific community. Not directly, at least. It's 100% about the public policy of the United States.

In fact, the third link is to a political activism blog financed by a liberal think tank... x.x I can't think of anything [i]less[/i] scientific. To construe that as a representation of scientists "marking and shaming" people who do not agree with them is... misguided. The problem here is not the scientific community, but the [i]political community[/i]. And seriously, [i]fuck those people[/i]. (And, events like the onset of the Spanish Inquisition were obviously not theological in nature either, but entirely political. Politics is truly the death of all that is holy, moral and just. Again, [i]fuck.[/i] [i]Those[/i]. [i]People[/i].)

It is definitely an interesting point, though, how fervently non-scientists will hold on to views presented to them in an unbiased, scientific manner... :( And how much scorn scientists get when they make mistakes. I don't know much about climate change, I don't know much about geology, but what I do know is that no experimentation is perfect, and any scientist or researcher or what have you will tell you the same. They get the best results they can based on the best equipment they are able to use and the best conditions they are able to experiment in... What pundits and activists do with that information afterwards can be regrettable, but that was the best information they had at the time. It's about progress, about learning from past mistakes, about not allowing paranoia and alarmism to color our perceptions of scientific research, and about always refining and gaining new techniques for learning about the world around us. 

[i]Eventually[/i], and that is the keyword, we will be able to know without a shadow of a doubt how everything works, but we're a ways away from that kind of understanding, so for now we have to make due, and strive to get there.

Now then, what other examples do you have?