And so it is we learn from the Daily Express, that most learned journal, that the ethos, the very foundation, of Climate Change science is in question :-
“CLIMATE CHANGE: FAILURES OF GLOBAL WARMING PROBES ‘LET DOWN PUBLIC’ : Wednesday September 15, 2010 : By John Ingham, Environment Editor : PUBLIC inquiries into the Climategate scandal have failed to restore confidence in the science behind global warming, a report claimed yesterday. It branded as flawed the three inquiries into the leaking of e-mails by scientists at East Anglia university’s world-leading Climate Research Unit. And it called for independent inquiries into the ethos of climate research and the science itself…”
We’re post-modern 21st Century humans. It’s OK to question everything. There’s every likelihood that we control our own destinies by our thoughts; that tobacco doesn’t cause lung and pancreatic cancer; that sexual intercourse between a male and a female is not the cause of human reproduction; that Jesus was Catholic, and not Jewish; that so-called waterborne diseases aren’t caused by microscopic organisms; that infection by the HIV virus doesn’t lead to AIDS; that Barack Hussein Obama is a non-American Muslim; that the CIA planned 9/11 (no, really, they did !); that mobile phone masts are killing bees (well, it can’t be the pesticides, can it ?); the moon landings were staged; that wind power will never amount to much, and that chocolate doesn’t give you spots.
If you want to believe that DDT controls malaria, then go right ahead. We live in a tolerant society, and your knowledge is just as good as mine, really :-
https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/09/indor_goklnay_ddt_and_malaria.php
And of course, it’s entirely reasonable to assert that the Earth is the centre of the Universe, for medieval clerics so believed :-
https://www.catholicintl.com/galileowaswrong/index.html
The theory of evolution, of course, is a hoax :-
“…The author, who has offered 10,000 euros to anyone who can scientifically prove evolution exists…”
(as found on https://johnquiggin.com/).
If we can question all of this, surely it’s not wrong to question not only the working practices of the world’s largest cooperative of Earth scientists, but the outcomes of their research as well ?
I mean, it’s alright to have people studying Climate Change, and keep them busy and out of our sight; but it they come up with answers, well, then we might have to review the whole process and issue lots of caveats and ho-hums.
To resort to anti-science jibes is so painfully weak a strategy on the part of the Climate Change sceptics it doesn’t have any plasma or platelets in its internal juices.
Trying to smear and slur Climate Change scientists hasn’t worked – so now the approach appears to be to deny the very science.
Fortunately, most people are all too clever for that piece of shenanigans, but I suspect that a few may slough off :-
“The right’s climate denialism is part of something much larger : 09 September 2010 : David Roberts : …It does seem to me that the [ political ] right’s climate denialism hasn’t been properly linked to the larger phenomenon of epistemic closure on the right [ “libertarian”, yet “conservative” wing ]. When Jim Manzi, everyone’s favorite sensible conservative, criticized fellow conservative Mark Levin for peddling intellectually shoddy skeptic arguments in his bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny, Levin went nuts, joined by a half-dozen other NRO writers. How could they not? The very same skeptic talking points in Levin’s book appear in thousands of blogs and comment sections across the interwebs. If they are intellectually bankrupt, a whole lot of people are going to look stupid. Regardless, to restrict discussion to climate science — how many scientists say what, who signed what statement, how many peer-reviewed papers say what — misses the forest for the trees. Climate denialism is part of something much broader and scarier on the right. The core idea is most clearly expressed by Rush Limbaugh: “We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the [ political ] left [ “liberal”, yet “socialist” wing ] here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap…” …”
How ignorant will we all appear in ten years’ time ?