D
Daxie
Guest
Who are you going to believe? Scientists, or your lying eyes?
The revelations in recent days that prominent members of the scientific community have been deliberately falsifying data to support the political conclusion that man is primarily responsible for "Global Warming" (now commonly referred to as "Global Climate Change," since the planet is actually not getting warmer), has raised a troubling question.
Unlike the social sciences, where agendas and opinions often substitute for "facts," the hard sciences are supposedly pure, objective and rational. Here numbers don't lie, statistically demonstrable trends aren't self-serving conjecture, and the only agenda behind these scientific inquiries is a pure, unfettered, search for the truth. If tree rings and dying polar bears tell us the planet is getting warmer, and an increase in C02 levels tell us man and man alone is responsible for the warming, then by God (or by Gore for those who can't quite fathom the notion that there is a Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe), the science is "settled." Anyone who thinks differently is just a religious fanatic trying to impose his version of God on the rest of humanity, or equally despicable, an anti-intellectual moron who's missing several of his teeth as well as major neural synapses.
And yet, there's this nagging, troubling problem that surfaced a few days ago where these same Keepers of the Truth on Anthropogenic Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change have been shown to be, well, a bunch of hypocrites and liars. Contravening data is ignored, suppressed or destroyed; supporting data is cherry-picked or manufactured out of whole cloth, and overlapping all of this is a political agenda tied to utopian social change and economic redistribution. Other than that, the evidence is pretty clear and convincing that man is the primary agent of global climate change going back hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Now, to those of us imbued with a modicum of common sense, this "Joe vs. the Volcano" scenario where Joe supposedly affects the climate more than nature does seemed a little, well, stupid to borrow a favorite phrase of mine. No one denies that man can affect portions of the planet by setting off a nuclear bomb here, building a dam there, or paving over a field and building a city or highway system. But to claim that all this is more of a reason for presumed global climate change than erupting volcanoes or the presence or absence of sunspots is, well, there's that word again: stupid.
I first posed this question back in 2006, for which I was roundly criticized as a "wingnut" and anti-science flat-earther.
Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way. Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die. Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true? And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it?
. . .
In other words, if there's a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn't we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?
When I wrote that piece, I was making an observation that we need to apply some common sense to our understanding of the world in which we live, rather than automatically accept the agenda-driven conclusions of others who use science to further their own venal interests.
If the scientist interpreting the data gets his funding from a government agency, and that agency won't fund the solving of a problem that is nature-made, then what other conclusion can the scientist draw than the problem — and solution — is man-made? Why spend $10 million to fund a research project on sunspot or volcano-driven global warming when we don't have the ability to stop a volcano from erupting, or do anything to affect the sun making its spots? But if man is the culprit, then there's plenty of reason to keep seeking, and receiving, taxpayer support. And if man — not nature — is the ultimate villain in this modern day morality play, then think of all the social engineering, global reparation payments, or just plain nanny-state fun you can have changing society around to promote a "solution" that can't be proven or disproven for decades to come.
All of which leads to the contemporary notions of "consensus science" and "settled science," which is shorthand for "would you shut up and stop asking these kinds of embarrassing questions because we already have the conclusions we want." It's the day real science was replaced with the notion that the consensus of non-scientists and scientists, who gather together in quasi-political organizations, was all that was needed to shut down debate. It is, in effect, the day science died.
I no longer trust "science" to be objective. As practiced today, it's just a different form of the base, venal, agenda-driven bilge we see in the mainstream media, whose purpose is not to educate and inform, but to protect and advance a private agenda. I wrote the following passage several months ago, and these words remain as true today as they were then.
Thirty years ago, if a major study said that the Earth was warming, or that red meat caused cancer, or that Candidate X was 30 points ahead in the polls, I may not automatically believe everything it says, but I wouldn't immediately dismiss it out of hand. Depending upon the degree of institutional credibility the study had (that is, The American Cancer Society vs. some organization I never heard of), I may start with the assumption that it's more right than wrong and proceed from there. If I had any questions, I'd look to see how and why the report arrived at its conclusions, and on this basis form a preliminary judgment about those issues.
Now the problem here is that unless you happen to have a degree in statistics, understand survey and polling methodology, or have an expertise in the scientific area of investigation under study, most people (myself included) can't really do this. So, we look instead for certain obvious clues. Is the study of 100 people, or 100,000? Does it say "will happen," or "might happen," or contain other qualifiers? Is the study peer reviewed, or put out by some organization with a vested interest in the matter?
These were the types of clues an intelligent observer would look to in forming an initial judgment. That opinion would be supplemented or diminished over the coming weeks and months as opposing experts in the field – who actually understood the technical stuff I didn't – would debate the matter. I'd learn about this debate from the press, which would summarize and report their findings in sufficient detail for me to see both sides of the issue.
But today there is no "press." There are newspapers and TV companies that have chosen a side and become advocates, not reporters. We've always had opinion-guided journalism in this country, so this in itself is nothing new. But again we're dealing with a sufficiently different degree of bias that has caused even Hillary (the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy") Clinton to condemn the press for its favoritism and prejudice.
This bias doesn't limit itself to swaying elections. Do you remember the last time you saw a debate on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or read about it in The New York Times, etc. that explored the reality of man-made global warming? Don't bother to look it up. There hasn't been.
Despite the fact that sea levels aren't rising, that winters are getting colder, that virtually none of Al Gore's predictions have come true and an increasing number of mainstream scientists are challenging the methodology that produced these conclusions, the matter is "settled" in the eyes of the press. This is because there's a lot more riding on this belief than whether we all need an extra pair of summer shorts to add to our wardrobe. An entire economic and political agenda of the Left is built around the premise that man is producing "global climate change" (the new term of choice since the Earth clearly isn't warming like it was supposed to). Challenge the premise, or at the very least allow for reasonable people to disagree, and suddenly the momentum is gone for acting now! Or, acting at all.
If the only consequence was that we could no longer believe our lying eyes (and ears) about what's being said about Republican politicians and global CO2 emissions, it would be bad enough. But the problem today extends much further than this. Because so much of what's being portrayed as "totally, completely, unmitigatedly true" in fact isn't, and adding insult to injury, the so-called truth of the matter may be the exact opposite of what is stated, the only reasonable course of action is to doubt everything.
And yet, not everything deserves to be automatically doubted. Some studies which show that X causes cancer, Y prolongs life, or Z is harmful or hurtful to man or the environment are undoubtedly legitimate. But damned if I can tell which ones are honestly conducted. Given how politics (with a small "p") has been injected into everything from eating beef to exhaling Co2, and that most studies rely on government funds (which means government biases) or private finds (which means private agendas), only a fool would automatically believe everything he's told. And momma Jackson didn't raise her little boy Phillip to be no fool, much like other people in this country who actually think.
Now, instead of accepting what "objective" sources tell me is true, my first reaction is to make them prove it. I don't care if their conclusions or remedy seem outwardly reasonable or not, or the scientific panel seemed wholly legitimate. I don't accept anything on face value anymore, regardless of its source. I rely entirely on my common sense, which is okay for those things I happen to have some direct experience in or knowledge about. But there's a lot more I don't know than I do know, and therein lies the problem. In the absence of legitimate, objective, trustworthy outside sources, I still need to rely on my own common sense to figure things out. Better to trust my gut on an issue I know nothing about, than put my trust in some political hack whose only purpose is to advance an agenda. I may not make the right choice, but at least I'm not a mindless lemming begging to be deceived.
Therefore, if 100 "independent" experts tell me that eating red meat causes cancer, I'll think about it between bites as I put some more Worchester sauce on my steak. If they tell me that more people are likely to die in car accidents if they're driving 75 instead of 55 mph while talking on their cell phones, I'll set the cruise control on 80 while I dial up my brother and ask him what he thinks. I may end up following the experts' advice, or I may not. They're no longer an intrinsic source of information, but rather simply a source of information – to be sifted through with as accepting and questioning an eye as I have for any other report or assessment, from any other source.
When there's no one you can really trust to give you the truth, you trust no one. Or, you make that source earn your trust with every new report they issue, rather than accepting what they say at face value.
Verify, then trust. And in the absence of either, ignore what they say and make your own judgment, as ignorant or informed as it may be.
This is the legacy that modern day "science" has bestowed upon the world. We intuitively understood that politicians were liars. We came to understand that the press covered up and distorted the facts as well to serve their own interests. But we always thought we could rely on science for an unbiased, objective, view of reality.
And now we find out that "scientists" may, in fact, be the worst offenders of all.
No wonder some scientists are atheists. Many of them don't believe in any Truth at all.
The revelations in recent days that prominent members of the scientific community have been deliberately falsifying data to support the political conclusion that man is primarily responsible for "Global Warming" (now commonly referred to as "Global Climate Change," since the planet is actually not getting warmer), has raised a troubling question.
Unlike the social sciences, where agendas and opinions often substitute for "facts," the hard sciences are supposedly pure, objective and rational. Here numbers don't lie, statistically demonstrable trends aren't self-serving conjecture, and the only agenda behind these scientific inquiries is a pure, unfettered, search for the truth. If tree rings and dying polar bears tell us the planet is getting warmer, and an increase in C02 levels tell us man and man alone is responsible for the warming, then by God (or by Gore for those who can't quite fathom the notion that there is a Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe), the science is "settled." Anyone who thinks differently is just a religious fanatic trying to impose his version of God on the rest of humanity, or equally despicable, an anti-intellectual moron who's missing several of his teeth as well as major neural synapses.
And yet, there's this nagging, troubling problem that surfaced a few days ago where these same Keepers of the Truth on Anthropogenic Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change have been shown to be, well, a bunch of hypocrites and liars. Contravening data is ignored, suppressed or destroyed; supporting data is cherry-picked or manufactured out of whole cloth, and overlapping all of this is a political agenda tied to utopian social change and economic redistribution. Other than that, the evidence is pretty clear and convincing that man is the primary agent of global climate change going back hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Now, to those of us imbued with a modicum of common sense, this "Joe vs. the Volcano" scenario where Joe supposedly affects the climate more than nature does seemed a little, well, stupid to borrow a favorite phrase of mine. No one denies that man can affect portions of the planet by setting off a nuclear bomb here, building a dam there, or paving over a field and building a city or highway system. But to claim that all this is more of a reason for presumed global climate change than erupting volcanoes or the presence or absence of sunspots is, well, there's that word again: stupid.
I first posed this question back in 2006, for which I was roundly criticized as a "wingnut" and anti-science flat-earther.
Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way. Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die. Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true? And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it?
. . .
In other words, if there's a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn't we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?
When I wrote that piece, I was making an observation that we need to apply some common sense to our understanding of the world in which we live, rather than automatically accept the agenda-driven conclusions of others who use science to further their own venal interests.
If the scientist interpreting the data gets his funding from a government agency, and that agency won't fund the solving of a problem that is nature-made, then what other conclusion can the scientist draw than the problem — and solution — is man-made? Why spend $10 million to fund a research project on sunspot or volcano-driven global warming when we don't have the ability to stop a volcano from erupting, or do anything to affect the sun making its spots? But if man is the culprit, then there's plenty of reason to keep seeking, and receiving, taxpayer support. And if man — not nature — is the ultimate villain in this modern day morality play, then think of all the social engineering, global reparation payments, or just plain nanny-state fun you can have changing society around to promote a "solution" that can't be proven or disproven for decades to come.
All of which leads to the contemporary notions of "consensus science" and "settled science," which is shorthand for "would you shut up and stop asking these kinds of embarrassing questions because we already have the conclusions we want." It's the day real science was replaced with the notion that the consensus of non-scientists and scientists, who gather together in quasi-political organizations, was all that was needed to shut down debate. It is, in effect, the day science died.
I no longer trust "science" to be objective. As practiced today, it's just a different form of the base, venal, agenda-driven bilge we see in the mainstream media, whose purpose is not to educate and inform, but to protect and advance a private agenda. I wrote the following passage several months ago, and these words remain as true today as they were then.
Thirty years ago, if a major study said that the Earth was warming, or that red meat caused cancer, or that Candidate X was 30 points ahead in the polls, I may not automatically believe everything it says, but I wouldn't immediately dismiss it out of hand. Depending upon the degree of institutional credibility the study had (that is, The American Cancer Society vs. some organization I never heard of), I may start with the assumption that it's more right than wrong and proceed from there. If I had any questions, I'd look to see how and why the report arrived at its conclusions, and on this basis form a preliminary judgment about those issues.
Now the problem here is that unless you happen to have a degree in statistics, understand survey and polling methodology, or have an expertise in the scientific area of investigation under study, most people (myself included) can't really do this. So, we look instead for certain obvious clues. Is the study of 100 people, or 100,000? Does it say "will happen," or "might happen," or contain other qualifiers? Is the study peer reviewed, or put out by some organization with a vested interest in the matter?
These were the types of clues an intelligent observer would look to in forming an initial judgment. That opinion would be supplemented or diminished over the coming weeks and months as opposing experts in the field – who actually understood the technical stuff I didn't – would debate the matter. I'd learn about this debate from the press, which would summarize and report their findings in sufficient detail for me to see both sides of the issue.
But today there is no "press." There are newspapers and TV companies that have chosen a side and become advocates, not reporters. We've always had opinion-guided journalism in this country, so this in itself is nothing new. But again we're dealing with a sufficiently different degree of bias that has caused even Hillary (the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy") Clinton to condemn the press for its favoritism and prejudice.
This bias doesn't limit itself to swaying elections. Do you remember the last time you saw a debate on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or read about it in The New York Times, etc. that explored the reality of man-made global warming? Don't bother to look it up. There hasn't been.
Despite the fact that sea levels aren't rising, that winters are getting colder, that virtually none of Al Gore's predictions have come true and an increasing number of mainstream scientists are challenging the methodology that produced these conclusions, the matter is "settled" in the eyes of the press. This is because there's a lot more riding on this belief than whether we all need an extra pair of summer shorts to add to our wardrobe. An entire economic and political agenda of the Left is built around the premise that man is producing "global climate change" (the new term of choice since the Earth clearly isn't warming like it was supposed to). Challenge the premise, or at the very least allow for reasonable people to disagree, and suddenly the momentum is gone for acting now! Or, acting at all.
If the only consequence was that we could no longer believe our lying eyes (and ears) about what's being said about Republican politicians and global CO2 emissions, it would be bad enough. But the problem today extends much further than this. Because so much of what's being portrayed as "totally, completely, unmitigatedly true" in fact isn't, and adding insult to injury, the so-called truth of the matter may be the exact opposite of what is stated, the only reasonable course of action is to doubt everything.
And yet, not everything deserves to be automatically doubted. Some studies which show that X causes cancer, Y prolongs life, or Z is harmful or hurtful to man or the environment are undoubtedly legitimate. But damned if I can tell which ones are honestly conducted. Given how politics (with a small "p") has been injected into everything from eating beef to exhaling Co2, and that most studies rely on government funds (which means government biases) or private finds (which means private agendas), only a fool would automatically believe everything he's told. And momma Jackson didn't raise her little boy Phillip to be no fool, much like other people in this country who actually think.
Now, instead of accepting what "objective" sources tell me is true, my first reaction is to make them prove it. I don't care if their conclusions or remedy seem outwardly reasonable or not, or the scientific panel seemed wholly legitimate. I don't accept anything on face value anymore, regardless of its source. I rely entirely on my common sense, which is okay for those things I happen to have some direct experience in or knowledge about. But there's a lot more I don't know than I do know, and therein lies the problem. In the absence of legitimate, objective, trustworthy outside sources, I still need to rely on my own common sense to figure things out. Better to trust my gut on an issue I know nothing about, than put my trust in some political hack whose only purpose is to advance an agenda. I may not make the right choice, but at least I'm not a mindless lemming begging to be deceived.
Therefore, if 100 "independent" experts tell me that eating red meat causes cancer, I'll think about it between bites as I put some more Worchester sauce on my steak. If they tell me that more people are likely to die in car accidents if they're driving 75 instead of 55 mph while talking on their cell phones, I'll set the cruise control on 80 while I dial up my brother and ask him what he thinks. I may end up following the experts' advice, or I may not. They're no longer an intrinsic source of information, but rather simply a source of information – to be sifted through with as accepting and questioning an eye as I have for any other report or assessment, from any other source.
When there's no one you can really trust to give you the truth, you trust no one. Or, you make that source earn your trust with every new report they issue, rather than accepting what they say at face value.
Verify, then trust. And in the absence of either, ignore what they say and make your own judgment, as ignorant or informed as it may be.
This is the legacy that modern day "science" has bestowed upon the world. We intuitively understood that politicians were liars. We came to understand that the press covered up and distorted the facts as well to serve their own interests. But we always thought we could rely on science for an unbiased, objective, view of reality.
And now we find out that "scientists" may, in fact, be the worst offenders of all.
No wonder some scientists are atheists. Many of them don't believe in any Truth at all.
