Science!™

Well, here we are on Vladimir Lenin's Birthday... I mean Earth Day... I mean March for Science Day, and the usual cast of characters are out in the street protesting. This time it's the "assault on Science™" that has them in an uproar. Having never completed my master's degree, I don't consider myself to be a scientist, although I've contributed in a small way to science. And my contribution have only been tangential to the main issue at play, which is climate science. However, I have worked in science for twenty-five years, and have a little familiarity with the way it works. My company is also dependent on scientific funding, as our non-industrial customers depend on grants for their funding, so from a purely mercenary basis, I'm heavily in favor of expanding funding of the sciences. Further, while I'm not a climate-change swallower, I suspect that human activity is affecting the global climate. What I am not in favor of is a rabble of non-scientists laying claim to objective truth and declaring debate closed on an issue in which the politically fashionable conclusion has not been demonstrated with sufficient rigor. I know brilliant scientists who are absolutely convinced of manmade climate change. And I know brilliant scientists who are absolutely convinced that the evidence does not support that conclusion. There are a number of fundamental problems with manmade climate change theory, but the most basic one is that the scientific method itself, which requires not only hypothesis and data collection, but explanation, modeling, and demonstration of validity, has failed to confirm the manmade climate change theory. Again, this doesn't mean that it's not correct - but it means that it has not been demonstrated to be correct. Invoking the ghost of Galileo, I'd say that we're in a similar circumstance, for while Galileo's heliocentric theory was ultimately correct, it flew in the face of the evidence at the time, and failed to explain the actual observed data. So it was the folks who were opposed to Galileo who adhered more closely to rational science than the brilliant, intuitive Galileo himself. Along those same lines, it is amusing to hear the protesters chanting in favor of peer review. Which, of course, was a medieval system created by the Church to ensure orthodoxy. The climate change swallowers like to bemoan the political and industry funding of the deniers as evidence of their corruption. But the dependence of climate-change swallowers on almost entirely political funding, coupled with their slavish devotion to orthodoxy, is equally if not more corrupt. The important thing to remember about Science is that you have to be open to the idea that your theory is wrong. You have to be willing to accept conclusions that you don't like. And you have to question all of the data, methods, and theories with equal rigor. The desperation to close debate, the vicious smear campaigns against dissenters, and the avaricious desire for access to the public treasury are all behaviors that are better suited to a medieval court than a rational scientific system.