Wednesday, February 15, 2006
When Science Stops Being Science...
...and becomes politics. The Prometheus blog, the science policy blog of the University of Colorado has a great piece "Slouching Toward Scientific McCarthyism."
In the 20 February 2006 issue of The New Republic, John B. Judis has an article about how the issue of hurricanes and global warming has been handled by NOAA. Judis is engaging in scientific McCarthyism by arguing that certain perspectives on science are invalid because they are viewed as politically incorrect by some.Science by concensus is not science at all, it is simply poltics. There is a difference between repeatability, that is to say other labs repeating experiments and achieving the same results, and simply agreeing. I know a number of "scientists" that agree with me that vanilla ice cream is the best ice cream in the world, but that does not make the assertion a scientific fact.
The transformation of this part of climate science into pure politics is fully embraced by those on the political left and the right, and most troubling is that this transformation is being encouraged by some leading scientists who have taken to criticizing the views of other scientists because they happen to work for the federal government. These scientists know full well how such accusations will be received. What ever happened to sticking to the science?
I am truly amazed at how this has happened. Some thoughts on this
- Most people view science with a superstious awe historically reserved for religion, out of simple ignorance. They don't know how it works, it looks like miracles.
- Science lacks any moral outlook, unlike religion; therefore, scientists have nothing to counter the genuine headiness that comes from such authority.
- Scientists therefore wish to accumulate more of that power and authority,
- Under such circumstances the accumulation and exercise of the power and authroity becomes more important than the science itself.
Now, once you abandon that which garnered you power and authority to begin with the power and authority generally slips away, but usually a lot slower than it ought to. We can only hope that science loses its authority before it leads us too far over the brink.
Related Tags: science, science policy, politics, global warming
