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The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."
What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:
environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
Often wrong but never in doubt, say the doctrinal heirs to Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.
Richard Feynman is possibly the most multi-talented Nobel Prize winner the US has ever produced, and is revered among seekers of truth as a prophet of the pitfalls of Big Science, which subsists on Big Problems. Feynman got his Nobel at 47, but went on to write peerless and eccentric analyses of the problems of science. His most famous, perhaps, was a lecture on what he called "Cargo Cult Science" and here is an extract illustrating Feynman's point, amusingly, with a SENATOR, those revered fonts of utter integrity!:
I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision."
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice........So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
Back then, big science was able to get to the moon in no time flat. Feynman had a famous argument with NASA, one of the perps in the current Big Science call for GW Kyoto Kabuki. NASA had tested the O-rings and other paraphrenalia on its Shuttles and predicted that one out of 100.000 flights would be catastrophic.... Feynman had done his own calculations and predicted one out of fifty. So far, two catastrophic accidents out of 116 Shuttle flights. Who's more reliable? Feynman, or the frauds at NASA who will say anything and pose as scientists to get impostors like Rockefeller and Snowe to take their political agenda seriously.
Feynman's punch line is as follows:
Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
The fake science at NASA behind Shuttle reliability killed two crews. The Global Warming fiasco these fraudulent impostors, who incidentally want to erase The Middle Age Warming Period as irrelevant or even statistically unprovable, are akin to the professor at the University of Wisconsin who says the that 9/11 was a US/Israeli plot. Pretty soon he might have as many believers as the Royal Academicides and the NASA Shuttle Reliablity cult have on Global Warming.
Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is online in its entirety, and I would commend the gentle reader if he simply clicks the link. Here's the first line in English:
"In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Yes, it does read a bit like Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But come to think of it, the delirious supporters of Global Warming hysteria have much the same agenda for the United States economic system.
Malthus and the Luddites have nothing on Rockefeller and the Snowe-jobbers attacking Exxon.
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