Global Warming Games

More Time Please

There is a very fine line these days between science and propaganda.  Old school science--that is, science in the good old days--was largely populated by a bunch of ruthless sceptics who believed very little, challenged everything, and wanted experimental proof.

This is not to say that every scientist believed he had to "go back to the beginning" and re-work every experiment to prove for himself the laws of motion or the veracity reflected in the periodic table of the elements.  As Michael Polanyi has argued, all scientists operate within a tradition of knowledge passed on from practitioners to neophytes that represented what he called tacit knowledge.  But, let a few experiments throw up results that are not expected, and old school scientists would get a rush of blood to the head.  The labs would be booked out for months, arguments would rage, and debates would go long into the night.

These days much of this rigour has disappeared--particularly in those "disciplines" where proof or disproof cannot be offered via experimental tests.
  Quickly these "disciplines" have degenerated into Soviet-style science where society dictated from the outset what results would be forthcoming from any scientific research.  Then a bunch of scientists scurried around "proving" what society was expecting.  However, we are not speaking of the Soviet Union here, but of science in the West.

Take a couple of examples.  The first is evolutionism.  There is not a shred of credible experimental evidence to support this inane theory.  Experimental proof would demonstrate biological modification in the lab that would change one species into another--say, a fish into a baboon or baboon to a fish.  Faced with this embarrassment the reflexive pseudo-justification usually runs along the lines--well, this process took billions upon billions upon billions of years to complete:  it can't be reproduced in the lab--which is just another way of saying that evolutionism is not in the least scientific.

Yet, it has been inordinately successful in capturing the halls of academia, the media, and governments.  the unexpected consequence is that evolutionism's popularity in the public mind has undermined the credibility of science everywhere.  Why insist upon scientific rigour when propaganda comes up trumps?  And if propaganda has been successful in winning ideological control so that the power structures of society are all bent to serve and endow the legend with money and favour, why not elsewhere and in other fields of "science".

Enter the second example: climate science.  Over the past thirty years, climate science has morphed into prophetic soothsaying.  Don't for a moment think that modern climate science is grounded in rigorous experimentation or the laboratory environment.  It's just speculative theory projected out a few centuries.  It cannot be disproved.  It just is.

For nigh on fifteen years global temperatures have not risen.  Does this threaten the legend?  Not at all.  It was never grounded on experimental scrutiny and confirmation or rejection in the first place.  It was grounded in an ideological world view which rejected industrialisation and economic development in principle.  The legend of global warming became a useful "just so" story to oppose economic development and industrialisation around the globe.  The scientific foundations of the legend were never important or necessary.  That is why it so quickly became politicised and contentious.

Every time you see a modern wind turbine think of it as a monument to folly, ignorance and propaganda.  To be sure, windmills, when first invented in the Middle Ages, were a tremendous technological boon.  Not only were they useful to grind grains to feed people, but the clever Netherlanders used them to pump water off the lowlands and greatly expand their economy and wealth.  But today's power turbines are so costly and inefficient they can only operate if tax payers subsidise them at every turn.  That's what happens when propaganda replaces science.

The United Nations has just produced its global climate assessment.  It is troubled by the hiatus in global warming.  How to explain?  Apart from a few half-baked hypothetical speculations, it has no answer.  It's real argument is, "It won't happen overnight.  But it will happen!  More time please."  Sounds just like the spurious justification for evolutionism.  Funny that.