Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Now I certainly wouldn't wish to suggest that all scientists are frauds. But I do think
thatthismodernreverencefortheprofessionisnotjustoverdonebutalsopotentiallyrather
dangerous. Essentially, it's a version of the rhetorical fallacy known as the
argumentum
ad verecundiam
— the appeal to authority. No person or institution is infallible: neither
a Nobel-prize winning geneticist like Sir Paul Nurse, nor yet a scientific body as
distinguished as the one of which he is president, the Royal Society (founded 1660).
Indeed, it was in acknowledgement of this truth that for the first two centuries of the Royal
Society's existence, its house journal
Philosophical Transactions
carried the following
'Advertisement': '… It is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always
adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art,
that comes before them.'
The reason for this was quite simple: scientific knowledge is not fixed. If it were—if
all nature's secrets were known—what would be the point of being a scientist? But what
ought to be immediately obvious to anyone who ponders the logic is apparently anathema
tothecurrentclimate establishment. FromNASAGISSintheUStotheClimatic Research
Unit at the University of East Anglia, from the Royal Society to the CSIRO, from the
IPCC to the UK Met Office, the official message is the same: the 'science' on climate is
'settled.' Only a handful of fruitloops, heretics and right-wing ideologues now dispute the
'consensus' on global warming.
This is not 'science' we're seeing in action, here, but a form of political activism.
One high-profile climate alarmist, the late Stephen Schneider—an IPCC lead-author and
professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University—came
close to admitting this in an interview with
Discover
magazine. '… Like most people
we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working
to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change … That of course entails
getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified,
overdramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have.'
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Charles Darwin would have disagreed. 'A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no
affections … a mere heart of stone,' he once said, and of course he is right. True science
is about discovering what 'is' not what 'ought to be'. It's about the rigorous application
of the 'scientific method', which values free, open enquiry, embraces dissent and stands or
falls on empirical observation. This means, for example, that when a once-plausible theory
is 'falsified' by real-world data, that theory becomes bunk—no matter what all the learned
scientific institutions may claim to the contrary.
Onceyouappreciatethatmuchofwhatisgoingoninclimatescienceisquintessentially
unscientific,theviciousnessofthedebatemakesalotmoresense.The'science'isoutthere
and has been for some time: Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is a busted flush. But
instead of conceding the point to the opposition, an arrogant, dishonest, ruthless climate
