hen did science change from actually testing hypotheses to assuming
that calculations and tendentious guesses represent reality? As Yoda might
have said, “If once you start down the dark path of abandoning
empirical verification, forever will speculation dominate your destiny.
Consume you it will.” He would have been right: science is being
consumed by worthless speculation.
A growing pile of books waiting to be reviewed
As evidence, look at the latest five books reviewed in Nature. Two are blatantly political and extremist. Since politics is the opposite of science, this seems like something Nature might notice, but no. Take Lee McIntyre's On Disinformation. Nature says:
He [McIntyre] regards the self-proclaimed “patriots” who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC after Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election as the result of “seventy years of lies about tobacco, evolution, global warming, and vaccines.”
What tobacco and evolution have to do with alleged election fraud, I can only guess. As for vaccines, the only one who got any long-term immunity from the vaccines our employers forced us to take was Big Pharma. Are those the vaccines he means? You'd have to read it to find out.
The final chapter offers ten ways to end the war on truth. The first step? “Confront the liars.”
No . . . the first step is know thyself and evaluate why you are so self-righteous about your beliefs. The second step is to find out where the empirical evidence is that you're right, and why you're so opposed to discussing the issue in good faith.
Why do so many people think that anyone who believes something that they disagree with is lying? Warming activists typically state their position in absolute terms: CO2 causes warming, which kills people, so anyone who says otherwise is lying and maybe even a murderer. It's hard to overstate the impact of the association of this absolutist rhetoric with science. Science began to flourish only when it abolished the spirit of absolute certainty and self-righteousness. It cannot be allowed to return.
Another iffy book is Off the Mark by Jack Schneider and Ethan L Hutt. According to Nature,
‘Grades, tests and transcripts stand in the way of student learning,’ write educationists Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt in their broad analysis of what is wrong with US schooling. The IQ test—introduced into US schools in the 1920s—was once considered revelatory, but is now relegated. Pupil assessments should likewise be dropped, they argue, in favour of improvements designed to motivate learning, communicate meaningful information about student knowledge and synchronize a ‘broken’ system.
What? Students have knowledge? When did this happen? As for the IQ test, it's widely recognized among psychologists that it's more reliable than ever. The problem isn't that it's unreliable, it is that educators think measuring IQ is racist. They know that saying this makes them look bad, so they blame the test.
How to get information about student knowledge, by which they must mean retention of information, without assessing it is a mystery, but an argument could be made for eliminating transcripts. Without them, students are free to take more challenging courses that could hurt their GPA. But this would force employers to administer comprehensive tests of knowledge. They won't, because that would cost money and probably get them accused of racism.
Science mag is trying to catch up to Nature, with a special issue on global warming, which they still attribute to CO2. The goal is to reduce it to a public health crisis that can be addressed with the government repression that worked so well during Covid. This on the same day as Nature's report blaming China for emitting HFC-23, which is said to be 14,700 times as potent as CO2. Surely there's a clue in there somewhere. It's widely accepted that the Montreal Protocol slowed down global warming. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that maybe CO2 is just getting a bad rap. Nature writes:
A warmer climate favors the mosquito that spreads dengue and may already be fueling a worldwide surge in the debilitating disease. Warming may also have enabled malaria-carrying mosquitoes to flourish in Africa's cooler highlands and ticks that carry Lyme disease to advance northward. Migratory birds, which ferry cargoes of pathogens such as West Nile virus and influenza across continents, are changing the timing and routes of their journeys, with consequences that have yet to emerge. [emphasis added]
This speculative language is becoming more common in science. It is little more than a series of guesses strung together to create an impression of a crisis that might or might not exist. Yes, a lot of things may be happening or could emerge in the future. They also might not. If only we had some way of finding out what they might be . . . .
Then there are the direct effects of heat on the human body. The worsening toll of heat waves is unmistakable, with thousands dying every summer, but researchers are also discerning subtler impacts. Among the most vulnerable to extreme heat are pregnant people and their fetuses. Epidemiological studies have already revealed links to preterm birth, low birth weight, stillbirth, and other complications, and now scientists are trying to understand the mechanisms.
‘Pregnant people.’ Sigh. . . . does Nature really want to risk getting J.K. Rowling mad at them? Seriously, scientists have shown over and over that cold is at least ten times more deadly than heat. The logical conclusion is that by reducing cold, global warming would provide enormous health benefits to all of mankind, including “pregnant people” regardless of the sex, species, and number of heads assigned at birth. Defying logic sounds like an impossible task, but maybe they got some tips from On Disinformation.
As China blasts ahead of us in terms of scientific publications two years earlier than predicted while the West consumes itself in speculation, no one in the science establishment has the foggiest idea why.
oct 28 2023, 7:24 am. revised oct 28 2023, 6:15 pm
