When the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confidently declared that it's over 90% sure that global warming is not only a significant problem, but that it's being caused mostly by human activities like driving cars and running power plants, it naturally convinced a lot of people. Even John McCain and Joe Lieberman declared it as fact in the Boston Globe last week, referencing "broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world," and concluding, "This report puts the final nail in denial's coffin about the problem of global warming."
Actually, what it does for me is put the final nail in objectivity's coffin about anything the scientific community comes up with. I had always suspected that much of their aura of scholarship was a rich mixture of things they actually knew and things they only wanted people to think they knew. Now it’s abundantly clear.
About as soon as the ink was dry on this IPCC report, convincing rebuttals came forth from The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, exposing the politics behind the scenes. When significant scientific opposition is banned from participating in the panel, it’s hardly a thing of wonder that consensus can so easily be reached by the remaining scientists, though word has it that even then it took some lobbying. Consensus was very a very important goal to them, as even they admitted. How odd that consensus should now be a determining factor in scientific analysis.
Their report, purporting to knock the objections over the matter out of the ring once and for all, turned out to be nothing more than another bell between rounds.
It’s in the very same light, I hasten to add, that we ought to see any declarations of the “scientific community” on matters in which they alone seem to have privileged access.
Like evolution, for instance. It’s hard to get them to even debate the matter, which suggests to me that for them it’s some sort of Holy Place where questions of legitimacy are blasphemy. If on a rare occasion they do debate, their talk is peppered with technical language no doubt meant to get the rest of us poor idiots wondering not only about our objections, but why we ever questioned such geniuses in the first place. As in the case of the IPCC, the matter seems for them to be settled by the mere confidence with which they make their pronouncements. You’d question us? And who are you? Don’t you know consensus has already been reached?
The age of relics, or of the earth itself—an integral component of evolution, of course—is another matter in which I am amazed that it is so hard to find ever, anywhere, or by anyone, an explanation of just how they arrive at the dating of artifacts. You’d think museums would have an exhibit on this somewhere, but I’ve never seen one. Carbon-14, unanium half-life, and the like, are notoriously flawed, even by their standards. So instead, the hallowed ground simply becomes a place of silence. And the rest of us are supposed to have an instinctive awareness that faith is the substance of things not seen.
And while we’re at it, here’s one more matter on which I have long mused. Admittedly I’m going out on a limb here, because I have never seen anyone question this, ever. Did you ever look up at the stars on a summer night and wonder how far away they really are? Gazillions of light years? Well, people like our bright friends at the IPCC have me second guessing even those kinds of scientific assertions. I mean, how do they know? Don’t tell me it’s parallax view. On something that far away? I can scarcely believe their instruments can make any such distinction in degrees, even if measurements are taken from one side of the earth, or solar system, to the other. I’m guessing—yes, purely guessing—that their determination has to do with the color of the light they see coming from a star. But what if their base assumptions are flawed here, as they are in so many other areas? What if those stars are of an entirely different nature, and much closer than a number of years with as many zeroes behind it as there are evolutionary hoaxes? Somebody tell me if I’m all wet on this one; I certainly could be, I readily admit. But I’d really like to know.
One thing I do know, and the jury is in: the scientists are as religious about their dogma as the rest of us are about ours, and about as dedicated. On any given matter on which they make confident assertions it is virtually as likely that they do as that they do not have scientific proof to back it up.
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