The Importance of Supporting Real Science in the Battle Against Narrative Science
Dr. Matthew Wielicki: “There’s a disconnect between what the science says and what the narrative in the mainstream media is….and what certain ‘activist scientists’ have been pushing.” Other scientists share his concerns.
Occasionally we are asked why Legal Insurrection features so much science among the articles featuring court cases, legal analysis, and updates on our push-back against Critical Race Theory and Diversity-Equity-Inclusion in education.
While there are many reasons, perhaps the chief one is that true science is being twisted to support political narratives that are destructive, both to our nation and to humanity. For example, the Twitter Files shed light on the degree to which good information from epidemiologists and physicians was suppressed during the covid pandemic.
Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services collaborated in a “censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.”
Disinformation warriors worked overtime to suppress “false” claims about the side effects of COVID vaccine, especially the true claims. Since the Food and Drug Administration officially (and speedily) approved COVID vaccines, any reports of side effects were automatically disinformation.
People are now challenging climate change narratives, which are proving to be just as incorrect, if on a different time scale. And this brings me to an excellent video from Prager University featuring Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a geologist and climate expert.
Wielicki was born in Poland while it was still under communist rule, so he has a deep appreciation for freedom of speech and personal liberty. His parents worked at California State University- Fresno at a time when professors and students were allowed to have different opinions about the issues of the day.
Another believer in freedom in science is Roger A. Pielke Jr., who recently prepared an exceptional column on ten principles for effective use of math in policy research.
It was his eighth entry on torturing data that caught my eye.
I don’t know who said it, but there is an old adage that says if you torture data enough, it will confess. Simple methods, shared data, easily replicable, with clear meaning are always going to be preferable in policy settings to complex methods, unavailable data, impossibility of replication with unclear meaning.
Both the natural and social sciences are guilty of unnecessary complexity in research design and implementation. A good example is the so-called “social cost of carbon” which employs mind-numbingly complex methods to arrive at results that can really be whatever you’d like them to be, simply by tinkering with assumptions and methods.
The hard sciences are canaries in the coal mine. If their data-driven conclusions, which should be experimentally reproducible, can be manipulated and massaged to promote ideological and/or political narratives resulting in elite policy objectives that affect us all, then no science (especially, it goes without saying, the social sciences) can be trusted.
If our leaders and our media want us to trust The Science™, then The Science™ must be trustworthy. Results must be replicated, data should be offered freely, and methodology must make sense.
Ultimately, though, I will leave the final word on the leftist march through the institutions—here, of science—to climatologist Judith Curry who confirms the climate “crisis” is manufactured.
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” climate scientist Judith Curry tells me.
She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
…“The origins go back to the . . . UN environmental program,” says Curry.
Some United Nations officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”
The UN created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.”
“Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding . . . assuming there are dangerous impacts.”
The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about “man-made climate change.”
As we enter into the New Year, I am grateful that the message and facts associated with real science are now less likely to be throttled on X. Alternative media continues to help support more rational interpretations of atmospheric, oceanic, and earth sciences.
Today’s bad science is intended to become tomorrow’s freedom- and America-destroying law, so I will continue to bring science and technology news to Legal Insurrection readers.
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Comments
It’s not “Climate Change”. It’s “Global Warming”. But they had to change the name because every time they held a Global Warming conference there was a snowstorm. I think it was Dehli where they held a Global Warming mob event and there was a 1 in 100 year snowstorm. It was a running joke about how Global Warming parties brought cold storms to any area.
Then, The Day After Tomorrow came out (which was, admittedly, a fun movie) in which the theory that Global Warming was going to, surprisingly, cause a new ice age, and they started experimenting with new names for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, claiming that all the global warming snow storms were really the effect to be expected … because Global Warming caused … whatever happened.
I believe “Climate Change” was the second or third name they tried out. They tried a couple more names after but none of them stuck … or polled well, I guess, so they settled on “Climate Change” as it was fuzzy enough to include everything possible as a consequence.
How about we just call it Bullshit?
How about we all take up a collection to pay off that Doom Goblin so she goes away?
How DARE you?!?
It is not necessary to have any knowledge of science to calculate if a theory is absolute bull. In the case of global warming, just look at the proposed resolution. No mention made of capture mechanisms, the went right to carbon credits and global communism with the destruction of western economy. They even said that these measures were not going to work, but we would be doing something, as if action is necessary. Then they changed to climate change, smart, as the climate has been changing for 20000 years or more. In fact it is never stable.
In the world of medicine, you know a lie by the amount of stats that accompany the proposition. Most doctors don’t understand stats.
I might add that peer review publication at all levels and all academic subjects is broken and manipulated by a handful of elites. Even in history, you must follow the accepted line to get published. I read history with T. Harry Williams at LSU. He hated Lincoln and thought he was a terrible man and leader. Yet he was compelled to write favorable to the man in order to maintain his credentials.
They use models to calculate the effect of man-made CO2. Don’t they know the heat transfer equation? Engineers have used it thousands of times a day for more than a hundred years to calculate the heat of everything from cars to computers. We know it’s accurate, and it shows that man-made CO2 cools the Earth (it’s cooler in the shade) by less than 1/1000th of a degree F. The effect lasts about 3 years.
Engineers deal with the real world, not fads. The wrong people could die when the engineers go woke!
Just volcanic activity dwarfs humanity’s impact. I think that the climate change issue is being pushed to disadvantage the West’s economy. and that in part China’s unrestricted warfare.
“If our leaders and our media want us to trust The Science™, then The Science™ must be trustworthy. Results must be replicated, data should be offered freely, and methodology must make sense.”
exactly. This is what my covidian friends did not understand. It was not that I didn’t believe covid COULD be deadly as claimed; it was that I did not believe The Science™ as it was disseminated to me, to us. The data was tortured, ignored; the methodology did not correlate with my understanding of viruses; and the propaganda was THICK.
It’s why Michael “Hockeystick” Mann won’t present his data for scrutiny in court. Or for other scientists to verify.
But Mann was willing to sue critics. He lost a case in Canada and (safe in America) ignored the ruling and stiffed the winner. Mann’s bogus claim against Mark Steyn and National Review is at least 12 years old—thanks to the procedural cesspool of DC which charlatans like Mann play like a fiddle.
It’s almost like they don’t even have a high school level understanding of the scientific method itself.
Similar to the instance in the early 2000s where historian Michael A. Bellesiles published material on gun inheritance (claiming guns weren’t a part of American culture until the Civil War era) and had his “cooked” results dismantled mostly by amateurs. His “research” was secret and when pressure to release data became too severe he claimed it was destroyed in a flood. Although his book was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2001, it later became the first work for which the prize was rescinded due to sloppy, unethical, and probably fraudulent work.
I wish for a planeload of climate hucksters to crash-land on a snowy peak in South America where John Kerry has to choose between Algore and Greta for a meal choice.
Been watching community in the snow?
Thus making real the conclusion of Tom Clancy’s thriller Rainbow 6.
I recall in the 70’s the “experts” predicted massive cooling, another “ice age”.
Of course, they were wrong.
It amuses me that the same people who cannot accurately predict the weather five days from now insist they can predict what will happen 10 or 20 years from now.
They don’t predict. They extrapolate based on what their inadequate and faulty computer models tell them. Of course, they wrote those programs.
The movement has it’s origins in communism; when the USSR fell, the communist migrated to the environmental movement to achieve the anti-capitalist goals.
Who in their right mind would think a mentally ill teenager should be dictating global energy policy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y564PsKvNZs
She has such punchable face
Yeah, the sneering little Marxist stooge needs a good ass beating, for sure.
A good article on somewhat the same subject: “What the COVID-19 pandemic really taught us about science, evidence and society”:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jep.13876
State of florida surgeon general is now saying that covid vax should not be used, because of unknown long term side effects.
Future lawsuit potential starting in florida, and spreading to other states, from anybody forced to get vax for work or school?
The trouble with calling it Climate Change is that the climate is always changing. It seems to go in cycles. Right now we are experiencing some warming, and you can observe it as the glaciers are receding. But they can’t prove it is from man made CO2 emissions rather than from natural causes. Everyone, including scientists, need to understand that there is still a lot we do not know.
We’ve been warming since the last ice age, which is why we don’t have glaciers covering New York and what allowed Man to flourish.
There is absolutely no proof, at all, that CO2 has anything to do with global warming. The big piece of evidence the global warming nuts have is the Vostok Ice Core data, which, interestingly, is one of the best pieces of evidence around and shows that there is a major 100,000 year climate period the Earth experiences and that we are currently at the unstable peak of one of those periods, about to head into a MAJOR ice age (“about to” in geological terms, some thousands of years).
Other than that, all the global warming loons have is cherry picked data sets (they like to combine different data sets to get the historical look they want – that’s the “hide the decline” stuff) and laughable computer model predictions, which have been extremely lame in every prediction they’ve made since they were built – each and every one of them.
It’s funny how the global warming nuts like to act as if climate modeling is dead accurate when the fact is that econometric models (which look at a much simpler system and for which much more money was available and spent on) have never been able to accurately predict the economy for any length of time in all their years of “use”.
“Right now we are experiencing some warming, and you can observe it as the glaciers are receding.”
Right now, some people who have an agenda say there is some warming … depending on how you measure temperature and assess “warming.” You can observe something that might be a consequence of the imputed warming: glaciers receding — some glaciers, depending on how you measure it, also reported by people with an agenda.
zIit’s like the point of the problem is to justify the solution waiting in the wings. Kinda like the solution to any difficulty in Europe is always “more Europe..”
Now, let’s do The ‘Rona.
Two words – Humbolt Current. It determines where the jet stream flows across the country. The Gulf Stream also oscillates but at a much lower (2-400 yr cycle) to create havoc.
I don’t see any difference between the modern globalist and the Catholic church during the Inquisition.
“I don’t see any difference between the modern globalist and the Catholic church ”
FTFY
The very phrase ‘trust the science’ is lunacy.
You don’t TRUST science. You PROVE science. You VERIFY science.
Trust has zero place in any actual scientific process.
This is so very true.
This is so very true. A science is a study of a particular topic, and “the science” for that given topic represents our level of UNDERSTANDING if that topic. That understanding may or may not actually be correct. For instance, “the science” of the nature of Earth was, at one point, that Earth was flat. Our understanding obviously failed to correspond with reality, and eventually a different understanding was actually proven.
Unfortunately many folks refuse to weigh facts and evidence and instead spout off the latest hotness from their favorite on line source or legacy media outlet. Gullibility is not limited to woke leftists, plenty of folks on the right slow themselves to be bamboozled from grifters who exploit the right just as effectively as those who exploit the left.
It doesn’t take more than a HS level education, common sense and applying a bit of skepticism to see through most of these grifters. The key is skepticism instead of leaping to believe the BS some internet site proclaims as ‘truth’ b/c we want it to be true. That’s a very accurate tell that it is bogus and at minimum needs more evidence, and evaluation before we proclaim it as holy writ.
There are a large number of differential equations that must be solved simultaneously to ‘model’ the climate.
Those equations include coefficients that are not well known. The ‘scientists’ that develop these models can dial up or down these coefficients, creating any result they wish.
Young Miss Greta is now an adult, and if she truly wished to understand climate models, she would have enrolled in a Swedish Physics program, yet she insists on running around for political events.
Erronius
She is not smart enough to actually understand what little we currently know about the subject. She is a groupie.
Climate Change Fanatics and Islamic Terrorists. Both want to subjugate the entire planet into their Doom Cults
Absolutely. The scientific evidence strongly supports anthropogenic global warming, from the basic physics of heat to historical evidence to robotic buoys to satellites.
OK, then explain all of the shifts in climate that have happend in the 10,000 years immediately before the inductrial revolution. Studies on the Great Lakes have demonstrated human civilizations living in areas 200 ft below the current level, and the mackinaw Canal was carved first as a river with a towering waterfall into Lake Huron. Those 10 million (est prior to agriculture) occupants of the planet sure were able to cause massive damage and changes with their sporadic campfires.
While it is true that the temps in cities is creeping up (asphalt and bricks will do that), the rural areas are still pretty much the same and between them and the seas cover about 99% of the planet.
MajorWood: OK, then explain all of the shifts in climate that have happend in the 10,000 years immediately before the inductrial revolution.
Greenhouse gases are not the only mechanism that causes changes to the Earth’s climate, including orbital variations and volcanism.
MajorWood: While it is true that the temps in cities is creeping up (asphalt and bricks will do that), the rural areas are still pretty much the same and between them and the seas cover about 99% of the planet.
Land stations show the surface is warming, robotic buoys show that ocean waters are warming, and satellite observations confirm the warming trend of the lower atmosphere; all consistent with anthropogenic forcing.
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/images/2022-07/temperature_figure1_2022.png
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Skepticism is necessary when dealing with predictions and theories about tremendously long time scales. In high school science classes there are labs where experiments are done that have been repeated millions of times. No such verification process is possible in climate science. The lack of humility on the part of climate alarmists is incredible. And when they make near term predictions, there are widely different guesses as to average temperature increases and mostly vastly over estimate what is observed. What is more the calculations of average temperature change is based on measurements that are so far apart that the error estimates from such measures far exceed the actual changes. What is more, the average they claim is actually a weighted average of observed temperatures taken from such observation posts as ocean buoys or ships at sea. Measurements from satellites have often shown less actual warming.
The origin of temperature alarmism is from attempts to understand planetary atmospheres as a way to foresee the challenges of human travel to the planets in the solar system. One of the most important questions concerning travel to Mars is the matter of temperature. Mars is too cold for human habitations and Venus is too hot. Why? Are there ways to mitigate these problems so that Humans could exist on these planets? I think that NASA scientists were motivated to study the earths temperature in order to better understand the temperature profile of our neighboring planets.
The climate alarmists claim to infer future impacts from data over very small time scales and where the date is itself not accurate enough to detect the kind of change that could verify the theory. What is more, the biggest driver of temperature is solar radiation, something we can only speculate about, certainly without the precision that enables such claims as the the oceans will rise ten meters in the next hundred years.
This doesn’t mean that atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn’t affect the average temperature but it is far from certain how, how much or what other affects does it have that may mitigate its effect.
Jonathan Cohen: No such verification process is possible in climate science.
And no one watch a change over deep time, so, according to your myopic view, scientists can’t reach reasonable conclusions about the evolution of stars. Or, for that matter, can’t determine the composition of stars, because they can’t visit stars to take a sample.
But that’s not how science works. Rather, hypotheses are proposed and then the entailments tested.
Jonathan Cohen: And when they make near term predictions, there are widely different guesses as to average temperature increases and mostly vastly over estimate what is observed.
Forecast evaluations
Jonathan Cohen: What is more the calculations of average temperature change is based on measurements that are so far apart that the error estimates from such measures far exceed the actual changes.
If we measure 1,000 places more or less spread across the Earth’s surface, and 900 show a warming trend and the rest show no trend, what is the probability that the Earth is actually warming? Or even more simply, assuming a random measurement error of 0.5°C, and we repeat the measurement 100 times, what is the margin of error of the mean of those measurements?
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