As in: “I am struck at how dumb these supposedly intelligent people are acting.”
The members of the US National Academy of Sciences issued a letter denouncing “McCarthy-like threats and tactics” by engaging in McCarthy-like threats and tactics.
For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past the theory of evolution. Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.
Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.
No credible alternative theory? Really? They’re going to hang their hat on that statement?
Seeing as how I can think of three very good ones off the top of my head, I am going to call bullshit.
And then there is, what I can only guess is supposed to be the laugh line: That the IPCC corrects itself when a mistake is pointed out. I have seen no corrections. I have not even seen where they admit a mistake was made. A student’s thesis paper containing only anecdotal evidence from mostly unnamed hikers and mountain climbers, which was used to “prove” significant snowfall decrease in the Andes, didn’t even get press here in the US.
I know that these lazy bastards have gotten used to Glowball Warmening being their easy meal ticket, but to whine and moan about their theory being taken down by a minuscule population of underfunded scientists while they sit upon their largess of pro-AGW study funding, which is at least a multitude more than anything an non-AGW believing scientist will ever have available to them is, frankly, disgusting.
Simply put, it is the unholy mixing of politics and science that is disgusting. Science is supposed to live in it’s own world, by it’s own rules. It’s not supposed to be “controlled” (as in the “controlling science”) by outside political forces.
Above all, science is for, and ONLY for, those who can adapt to it’s rules of evidence and proof. When “science” lets in charlatans who bend and tweak those rules, the “science” which follows can never be trusted.
My father was a scientist, and I can’t count the number of times he patiently defined those rules of science for me, but it was many, many times.