2005/05/15 - José Carlos Rodríguez - Libertad Digital

Down With Science!

At some point, we have heard reference to “the scientists” and we surrender to this term with the same reverence we surrendered three centuries ago to accusations of witchcraft.  And so, without any proof, we fixate on what the media tells us. The problem arises when the word “science” is manipulated for strictly political ends.

If to explain a storm, someone attributed it to witchcraft our first reaction would be to laugh at him. We know science can explain the reasonable causes of storms. But, we have no right to be proud in stating this because most of us are so far removed from scientific questions that the word “science” represents much the same to us today as referring to witchcraft did not long ago. This might seem paradoxical, but let me clarify.   

In a civilized society, we each concentrate our efforts on but a tiny part of general knowledge. However, we are constantly benefiting from that general knowledge: for example, science. The vast majority of us have no clue the degree to which the planet is warming and we ignore the causes of this warming, if it is even taking place. The only reason we are aware of this issue is the media. At some point, we have heard reference to “the scientists” and we surrender to this term with the same reverence we surrendered three centuries ago to accusations of witchcraft. Today we know the reasons for natural phenomena lie in science. But when we enter into specific issues, questions like the evolution of our climate are completely unfathomable. And so, without any proof, we fixate on what the media tells us.    

The problem arises when the word “science” is manipulated for strictly political ends. This is case with the Kyoto Protocol. Anyone who has read Libertad Digital’s interview with Christopher Horner will have raised an eyebrow on more than one occasion. Mr. Horner says the scientists making up the IPCC, the United Nations (that august institution) body fighting global warming, are not exactly the best prepared. In one of his books Patrick Michaels, a truly respected climatologist, reports no more than a third of the scientists summoned by the IPCC are climatologists. The other two-thirds talk about the climate without having dedicated themselves to its study.       

As Mr. Horner explains, this does not really matter. The scientists’ conclusions are later changed for those of politicians and NGOs –in other words, lobbies. And even though these retooled conclusions have no connection to the ones reached by the scientists, our nation-savers insist they are part of the “scientific consensus”. Anyway, who is going to read hundreds of pages written in incomprehensible jargon to discover that, once again, the politicians are lying to us?

This political meddling has contaminated scientific magazines. The Daily Telegraph newspaper recently reported that various scientists were censured for questioning the idea that industrial emissions are chiefly to blame for global warming. Such censorship has taken place in the magazine Nature, which has been stepping all over its long lost reputation of late, and in Science (striving to place itself at the scientific summit alongside Reader’s Digest).

As evidence, take an article from December claiming nothing less than that the scientific consensus (a contradiction in terms) backed the theory stating the rise in global temperature was caused by man-made gas emissions. The author based this nonsense on an analysis of 1,000 scientific articles published since the early 1990s. According to the article three out of every four articles approved this theory and none challenged it.  

The result is most surprising, because many of the most celebrated climatologists have said just the opposite: that there is no scientific ground for such a theory. A group of them wrote down their objections in the Leipzig Declaration. This Monday, 16 internationally respected climatologists met in Madrid to denounce as extra-scientific the green house theory pointing to man as the origin and principal cause of global warming.

Scientist Benny Peiser, suspicious of that Science article’s data, analyzed the same 1,000 articles and his findings were predictable: Science had lied. Only a third of those 1,000 backed the theory, although only 1% did so explicitly. Science refused to publish Mr. Peiser’s results. Why is science being manipulated like this? For political reasons. Jacques Chirac said in The Hague in November 2000 the Kyoto Protocol was “the first step toward a world government”: a path on which the search for truth, scientists’ job, has no place.