Galileo is held up as a scientific martyr today, because he fiercely defended the Copernican solar system against the Inquisition, which [2] finally ordered him to stop publishing those ideas. Cardinal Bellarmine denounced Copernican theory as “…injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false.” Today we have a radical role reversal. Climate heretics like Dr. Fred Singer and MIT’s Prof. Richard Lindzen are telling truth to power — and they are bitterly criticized by our science politicians, just as the pope criticized Galileo. Singer and Lindzen are our Galileos…Today we have our own official science czar in the White House. John Holdren is a true believer in the imaginary faith of global warming. We even have an office for the propagation of the faith, spearheaded by NASA’s James Hansen. It is Hansen who goes around saying that the oceans could rise by 20 feet and that heretics…deserve to be [4] put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.” This witch-hunting…passes for normal scientific discourse in Dr. Hansen’s mind….Obama’s Science Czar Channels H.G. Wells on Climate Change, Lifestyle, Money, Politics, Science, Science & Technology, US News, 4/13/09
We’ve laughed at this stuff for ten years. The writer has no doubt that Galileo laughed at the official scolds in the Vatican for as long. It didn’t help. Humor does not defeat irrationality anymore than laughing at a tumor makes a cancer go into remission. Surgery, radiation, chemo, these modalities weren’t developed as a placebo, but as the only available means for fighting an implacable enemy. The same is true of irrational faiths. We spent seventy years and tens of trillions of dollars fighting the derangement of the Soviet Union. When adults believe in a looney idea, it becomes a fight to the death. Believe it. No amount of reasoning, or good humor, is going to convince true believers that they’re wrong.
“Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being ‘in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.’” He forgot to add, “with a hallucinating driver conjuring up imaginary dangers.” But that’s closer to the truth. Our real problem is not the earth or the CO2; it is the human beings who are now in power, fully prepared to scare the daylights out of us to squeeze out more power and more money for themselves…(Obama’s Science Czar…cont’d)
In the dead Soviet Union, Stalin was so convinced that Darwin was wrong that he insisted that the outcome of a scientific experiment should meet a political criterion. (See Arthur Koestler’s Midwife Toad). With the power of a ruthless state and its secret police, Stalin could be confident that no one would dare allow a scientific result that contradicted a political absolute. The result was that biological science in the USSR was set back a hundred years.
America is a lot richer than Stalin’s USSR. Faith healers like Holdren think that spending trillions of dollars to “cure” global warming, even at the risk of destroying our productive capacity as a society, is justified despite the painfully obvious facts, that the evidence is contrary to the political conclusion. What we are seeing here is a deep, political pathology, the kind that cannot be pleasantly argued away in the cloakrooms of the Senate. Even Dennis Miller's corrosive satire cannot help. It will require instead political action in pursuit of the truth, the most dangerous politics of all, for nothing is more willing to victimize, to lie, to cheat, to steal than a political pathology that denies the evidence.
Acceptance of the a priori is the deepest sin in scientific pursuits. How much of this do we have to see before we stand up to be counted?
Real engineering is based on good science, but there is no good science here….That is why climate predictions have to be made for a hundred years from now, because that makes them impossible to disprove….But the money has to be taxed now, to empower science frauds and hype-mongers who promise to save our hides in 2100….“Global warming” is more Scientology than science….All the climate prophets are playing on public ignorance.
The time for jokes is over. These clowns are now in charge. The time has come to act.
Luther
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