We recently had (ANOTHER) march this past week. This time for “science”. Apparently the new administration is hostile towards science. The only science that anyone not on the catastrophic climate change bandwagon opposes is political science. We are constantly told “the science is settled.” But not just on Climate Change, but on a variety of issues, such as evolution for example.
The point of this article is not to discuss climate change, but I will take a quick aside to note that the 97% figure is used by politicians. It is a statistic that is skewed until it forms into the view that supports the bias. That is the problem with statistics, they are easily manipulated. Amongst climate scientists, the science is not so settled, and the literature says so. There is still a large percentage that support the theory, but is it any wonder, considering that for the past eight years anyone that thought to even question it was driven out of their profession. I have to ask, is questioning the status quo not what science is? The traditional story is that Copernicus and Galileo questioned the geocentric model of the solar system. But the science had been settled. Nearly 100% of scientists had accepted the heliocentric model. But the political maneuvering to get climate change as established as the dominant position raises some flags. Truth is truth, and if your side is in the right, then there is no need to black list the opposition.
But what is the harm in being cautious, to listen to these scientists and seek for solutions? For one, there is no energy source that can provide enough energy to meet the world’s need as efficiently or in a cost-effective manner. But that leads into the real purpose of what I am getting at: Shouldn’t science be king? This is interesting coming from the same group of people that claim the to be opposing the “fascism” of the Trump administration (by fascism, they are referring to the holocaust). Why is this ironic? Well, Hitler was not an anomaly that sprouted from nowhere and radicalized Germany. He was very much a product of his time.
The idea of eugenics has its start in the progressive movement. Progressivism is basically the idea that the state should be the driving force to improve society. It was based very much on science. These are the same people that gave us prisons that were to rehabilitee criminals, prohibition to reduce crime, and the federal reserve to help raise the poor up. The idea was that maybe through state programs, the less desirable aspects of society could be bred out, and lead to a better world. This was not a fringe movement. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, was a believer in eugenics. Many US states had their own eugenics department. Thousands of people up through the 60’s were forcibly sterilized, many without their knowledge. This is swept under the rug for one simple reason: the eugenics societies in New York sent funding to Hitler to help jump start his eugenics program. Centralized economic planning and totalitarian governments were very much a scientific experiment to see if it would work better than the democratic ones that had been blamed for the depression. It is through these totalitarian states that the supremacy of science and state planning could reach its ultimate logical conclusion: the systematic extermination of anyone deemed too inferior to exist in society.
So where the science points to a cost in human lives, the science should always be questioned. And science is best left to scientists, not politicians.