Dismal Sciences

The world is full of scientists who have abandoned their craft ... and are shoving each other aside to get "liked" on Facebook or have their video go viral on YouTube. Science starts with a premise, collects reliable data, conducts experiments to validate, modify or disprove the premise, offers the data and experiment protocols to peers for reproducible validation or invalidation and, finally, publishes results using a non-political narrative. This is called the "scientific method."

Unfortunately, due to social, monetary and academic pressures, this scientific methodology has, in many instances, been short circuited ... or even abandoned. And, equally unfortunately, our naive public seldom notices ... not a recipe for greater enlightenment. May I offer some contemporary examples?

- Psychiatrists and psychologists are diagnosing our president with all kinds of mental maladies without having examined him in person. This goes against the basic tenets of these soft sciences.

- Climate scientists (97%?) who build computer models using "adjusted data" whose predictions do not even come close to transpiring ... yet who tenaciously hold by their debunked premises.

- There have been some pretty astounding predictions made by scientists and scientist wannabes about the future of artificial intelligence ... from the future of autonomous cars to cyborgs eventually taking over our lives. Many of these predictions seem pie-in-the-sky ... driven more by Internet grandstanding than by true science.

- Has anyone (besides my son) worried about the demands that might be put upon our electric grid if our nation went totally electric cars, trucks, buses and planes? Yet, Elon Musk is leading us by the nose into this brave new world. Either we have converted to nuclear power plants by then ... or the output of fossils fuel plants will rise dramatically. (And I will never fly by in a battery-powered plane.)

- Economists, the most dismal scientists of all, are quick to predict the results of changes in regulations, taxes and tariffs --- most of which are not based in any science but on political leanings.

Settled Science

Obummer has repeatedly quoted that false narrative that 97% of scientists think that there is man-made global warming and therefore "the science is settled" ...  a quote meant to be echoed in the main-stream media in order to shut up the deniers of this clap trap. Such drivel drives true scientists up the wall because they know that there never is any science that is truly "settled." This is not the true nature of science. New information continually causes science to review previous axioms to see if they still hold up ... which often they don't.

Now 300 scientists and economists have signed a letter to NOAA, the keeper of  the primary global temperature data, demanding that it release their undoctored data. This is so other unbiased scientists can use this data use to check the results of the inner circle of those claiming that the Earth is warming ... see: Daily Caller Article.

And this is also because it has recently been revealed that this data has been corrupted by these government "scientists" who felt that they needed to "adjust" this data so that it would agree wth their foregone conclusions. These  conclusions are being refuted by actual results which are not agreeing with their computer models. In other words, if the data does not support the "science," change the data. This is a profound corruption of the scientific method and hiding the original primary data from the rest of the scientific world corrupts this corruption.

More interestingly, since 288 of these 300 letter signers are true scientists, if they perhaps were the full contingent of the 3% deniers in Obummer's oft-repeated quote, the the other 97% would represent 9,600 other scientists who unequivocally support this global warming fiction. It would be very nice and very scientific if Obummer would produce a list of these 9,600 "settled" scientists.