Follow the science?

Through much of the COVID19 episode, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has denounced with outrage those who question or dispute official guidelines about masking, distancing, etc., bellowing “Just follow the science!”

— by which he means, accept what the recognized authorities state that “the science” is.

What Scarborough doesn’t know — together with almost all other media pundits and commentators — is that the recognized authorities are sometimes wrong.

For those who know something about science, and particularly about the history of science — perhaps especially medical science — the problem is, how to find out what “the science” actually is, the  pertinent facts and contextual evidence.

Most of us have to rely on what the experts and the  recognized authorities tell us, but that is not always correct.

Although quite often there are eminently expert individuals who point that out, typically they are ignored, denigrated suppressed, persecuted. Re HIV/AIDS, see for example the case of Peter Duesberg, chapter 3 in [1]. Re aluminum, consider the example of Christopher Exley [2].

The salient point is that official pronouncements by the recognized authorities about scientific matters need to be fact-checked.

The lack of fact-checking has led to some highly damaging public policies and actions. The list of topics on which the official global “scientific consensus” happens to be wrong is alarming,  both in the public importance of some of the topics and in the steady growth in the number of specific matters which the global public has been misled and continues to be misled:

HIV/AIDS [3]

Global warming and climate change (pp. 18-26 in [1]; many posts at https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com

Eugenics [4]

A host of medical matters [5]

— including notably vaccines [6]
— and the risks posed by aluminum adjuvants in vaccines as well as by other sources of aluminum  [7]

The crucial point is that truth, including truth about scientific matters, is a public good: it surely benefits humankind as a whole, in the long run; but specific truths quite typically undercut some strongly vested interests. Truths about drugs and vaccines diminish profit-making by pharmaceutical companies, and thereby lessen political campaign contributions; and so on for all the commercial and ideological sectors of society. Environmental activists don’t want truths about climate change. No political parties want real truths about economics or sociology or psychology.

Humankind needs a system capable of discerning genuine truths; which includes fact-checking of what the recognized authorities say about scientific matters.

_____________________________________________

[1]    Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012

[2]    “University Shuts Down World-Renowned Aluminum Expert’s Research After Big Pharma Sets Up Shop on Campus”

[3]    The Case against HIV , listing >20 books and >900 articles

[4]    Tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized as recently as 1981 on the basis of expert consensus about the heritability of certain behavioral traits — Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012

[5]    WHAT’S WRONG WITH PRESENT-DAY MEDICINE;

[6]    “Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy”
Peter C. Gøtzsche, Vaccines: truth, lies and controversy (Kindle 2020, Skyhorse 2021)

[7]    Publications by Christopher Exley summarized in recent book: Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions With Mr. Aluminum (Skyhorse 2020)

The Loch Ness “Monster”: Its real and important significance

Because of my writings about Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster [1], I am periodically approached by various media. Last year I had published [2] the suggestion that the Loch Ness creatures are more plausibly related to sea turtles than to the commonly popular notion of plesiosaurs.

A Scottish journalist came across that article, and for one day something about it and me was featured in every yellow-press newspaper in Britain, and several broadcast media asked for interviews.

The episode reminded me of some of the things that are so wrong with modern mass media.

Their overriding concern is simply to attract an audience. There is no intention of offering that audience any genuinely insightful analysis or context or background information. Media attention span approximates that of Twittering. One television network asked for an instant interview, wanted the best phone-contact number, even offered me compensation — and then never followed up.

I did talk to one Russian and one Spanish station or network, and I tried to point to what the real significance is of the Loch Ness animals, namely, that their existence has been denied by official scientific sources for not much less than a century, demonstrating that official science can be wrong, quite wrong; and while that matters little if at all about Loch Ness, I said, it does matter greatly when official science is wrong about such matters of public importance as HIV/AIDS  or climate change,  about which official science does in fact happen to be wrong [3].

So far, however, my bait about those important matters has not been snapped up.

Misunderstandings about science are globally pervasive, especially not realizing that it is fallible. The consequent unwarranted acceptance of wrong beliefs about HIV and about carbon dioxide demonstrate the need for some institution independent of official science, independent of existing scientific organizations and institutions, to provide fact-checking of contemporary scientific consensuses, an impartial, unbiased, strictly evidence-based assessments of official science. In other words, society sorely needs a Science Court [4].

Misconceptions about science can already be seen as a significant reason for flaws in the announced policies of the new Biden administration, as it places high priority on “combating climate change” and engaging in a “moon shot” to cure cancer: having not learned any lessons from the failure of the war on cancer, or from the fact, obvious in great swaths of the geological literature, that carbon dioxide is demonstrably not the prime cause of global warming since there is no correlation between global temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere [5], neither over the whole life of the Earth nor over the last couple of centuries.

——————————————————

[1]    The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery, University of Illinois Press, 1986/88; Wipf & Stock reprint, 2012
GENUINE  FACTS about “NESSIE”, THE LOCH NESS “MONSTER”
[2]    “Loch Ness Monsters as Cryptid (Presently Unknown) Sea Turtles”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 34 (2020) 93-104
[3]    Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland, 2012
The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[4]    Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland 2017), chapter 12
“The Case for a Science Court”
“Science Court: Why and What“
[5]    “A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?”
”Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide”

Patriotism, ideology, science, politics

The development of atomic weapons during the Second World War is widely regarded as an enormous achievement of science — though it would be described more accurately as an enormous practical, interdisciplinary, achievement with contributions from engineers as well as chemists, physicists, mathematicians — and not forgetting that government played an entirely necessary role in providing and arranging appropriate administration and resources.

Not widely remembered nowadays is the fuss, the outrage aroused by the matter of espionage concerning atomic weaponry, in particular that some details of the technical developments were shared secretly with the Soviet Union by some dedicated communists in the USA and in Britain.

Those who did this secret sharing are commonly described as traitors. However, some of them and some of their supporters defended their actions by appealing to an idealistic ideology of science as a universal public good that belongs properly to all of humankind and not just to those who make discoveries or to the discoverer’s institutions or nations.

That attempt at rationalization and excusing, blatantly self-serving, will hardly carry much weight with most of us, but there are less extreme instances where the relation between science and politics, ideology and patriotism, can be troubling and far from clear-cut.

Nowadays, for example, politically liberal skeptics about global warming and climate change may confront — or talk themselves into — a dilemma: the hegemonic attribution of climate change to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is factually wrong: see blog posts listed below; but universal recognition of that would be a political triumph for right-leaning political groups and a severe undermining of the credibility of left-leaning groups and environmental activists. Belief in human-coerced climate change and global warming (AGW, for anthropogenic global warming) has become an unquestioned dogma among politically left-leaning individuals and groups whereas that belief is questioned or pooh-poohed almost only by those on the political right.

Should the truth about climate change, global warming, and carbon dioxide be suppressed in the fear that universal recognition of that truth might contribute to political successes by such authoritarian right-wing movements as those supporting President Donald Trump?

Dilemmas of that ilk are unavoidable so long as there is no authoritative source of scientific knowledge and understanding that is universally recognized as impartial, unbiased, non-partisan, trustworthy.

The only suggestion for what such a source could be is a Science Court that could earn the sort of respect that is accorded the United States Supreme Court in its better decisions. Prominent among the considerable number of non-trivial problems facing the possible establishing of such an institution is how to harness the political willingness and energy for such an establishment from all sides and shades of the political spectrum.

In reason, though, every individual and every political and ideological sect ought to recognize that it is to their clear individual advantage if the actual facts of the real world were in harmony with their beliefs, so that they could cite the authority of the Court as legitimation of their own particular ideology. Everyone and every group should therefore welcome the establishment of a universally agreed source of scientific knowledge and understanding.

Bringing one’s worldview or religion or ideology into harmony with material reality would also avoid the cognitive dissonance that threatens scientifically minded people whose religious or ideological sect preaches things that are at odds with scientifically established views. Thus many Catholics and fundamentalist Christians and their institutions will have been greatly relieved when the Pope finally acknowledged that evolution is more than a theory.

As the posts listed below illustrate, the evidence is quite overwhelming against the theory of human-caused global warming (AGW, anthropogenic global warming), yet it has become globally hegemonic, and contrarian dissenters are ignored or maligned or suppressed or censored or otherwise persecuted. I suggest that this topic in itself shows how sorely needed is a truly impartial and trusted institution for assessing scientific evidence and its interpretation, a Science Court. I discuss it in chapter 12 of Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland 2017).

 

—————————————————-

A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?
Climate-change science and cover-ups
Climate models are wrong — Surprise??
Mainstream propaganda by the BBC about denialism and global warming
Evidence-based global-warming science?
Climate change is responsible for everything, as everyone knows (but what everyone knows is usually wrong)
Sea-Level-Rise Hysteria
Climate–change beliefs are politically and not scientifically determined
Freeman Dyson on climate change
Psychological toll of climate-science belief
Climate change “deniers”
The political division over climate change
Who can be trusted about science? Not the Royal Society of London or the National Academy of the United States
Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide
Climate-change orthodoxy: alternative facts, uncertainty equals certainty, projections are not predictions, and other absurdities of the “scientific consensus”
What science says about global warming and climate change
Slowing of global warming officially confirmed — by reading between the lines
The consensus against human causation of global warming and climate change
Human-caused global warming as Groupthink
Australian university fires climate-change dissenter: dissent is not collegial…
What everyone ought to know about global warming and climate change: an unbiased review

What everyone ought to know about global warming and climate change: an unbiased review

“What everyone knows” is that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a “greenhouse gas” that holds in heat, warming the Earth and causing climate change, with catastrophic consequences if it isn’t stopped soon.

All official agencies, all mainstream scientific groups, say that.

What few people know is that a considerable number of experts and informed observers do not believe this AGW scenario to be correct: AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming, global warming caused by human actions.

Those dissenting experts point out that actual data on temperature and carbon-dioxide levels, over the life of the Earth but also over the last century, show that carbon dioxide does not cause high global temperature.

But few people, again, can believe that “everyone” could be wrong about this, that “science” could be so dogmatically wrong. To form an opinion as to the relative merits of the official view and of the dissenting experts, therefore requires not only looking at the data but also at how the official view came into bring and how and why it persists. Few people want to take the time and make the effort to wade through huge amounts of writings by opposing advocates to ferret out the genuine facts and legitimate conclusions, which often calls for reading between the lines and being skeptical about everything.

My recent discovery of the Peter Ridd affair had a wonderfully beneficial consequence, learning about the writings of Don Aitkin, an Australian whose academic career included research on social and political matters as well as administrative experience that included heading a university (as Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra). Aitkin spent a decade or more reading and thinking about AGW, and summarized what he learned in a series of blogs. The last in the series, #16,  sums things up and has appropriate links to the earlier ones which concentrate on different aspects of the matter.

This offers a wonderfully convenient way for anyone to become genuinely informed about AGW, and “climate-change denialism”, and incidentally about the interaction between science and public policy. Aitkin is factually reliable and ideologically unbiased, an all-too-rare combination.

*                     *                   *                   *                   *                   *                   *                   *

My appreciation of Aitkin’s series on global warming was enhanced when he noted that the hysteria over AGW “bridges the space between science and politics in an almost unprecedented way, though it has some similarities to the ‘eugenics’ issue a hundred years ago”, something that had occurred to me also.

Another Aitkin blog-post, “A good starting position in discussions about ‘climate change’” cites the salient points made by Ben Pile at Climate Resistance:

1. There is good scientific evidence that human activities are influencing the climate. But evidence is not fact, and neither evidence nor fact speak for themselves.
2. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed.
3. Our ability to mitigate, let alone to reverse, any such change through reductions in CO2 emissions is even less certain, and may itself be harmful.
4. The scientific consensus on climate change as widely reported inaccurately reflects the true state of scientific knowledge.
5. How society should proceed in the face of a changing climate is the business of politics not science.
6. Political arguments about climate change are routinely mistaken for scientific ones. Environmentalism uses science as a fig-leaf to hide an embarrassment of blind faith and bad politics.
7. Science is increasingly expected to provide moral certainty in morally uncertain times.
8. The IPCC is principally a political organisation.
9. The current emphasis on mitigation strategies is impeding society’s ability to adapt to a changing climate, whatever its cause.
10. The public remains unconvinced that mitigation is in its best interest. Few people have really bought into Environmentalism, but few people object vehemently to it. Most people are slightly irritated by it.
11. And yet climate change policies go unchallenged by opposition parties.
12. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet it has never been tested democratically.
13. Widespread disengagement from politics means that politicians have had to seek new ways to connect with the public. Exaggerated environmental concern is merely serving to provide direction for directionless politics.
14. Environmentalism is not the reincarnation of socialism, communism or Marxism. It is being embraced by the old Right and Left alike. Similarly, climate change scepticism is not the exclusive domain of the conservative Right.
15. Environmentalism will be worse for the poor than climate change.
16. Environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

*                   *                  *                     *                   *                   *                   *                   *

Aitkin is an Australian, and any connection to Australia always rekindles my appreciation for the sanctuary Australia provided the refuigee Bauers and the excellent public education from which I benefited in elementary school (Picton, NSW), at The Sydney Boys’ High School, and at the University of Sydney (moreover, in those years, at almost no cost to my parents!).
Browsing Aitkin’s writings, I came across an after-dinner speech about “Australian values”  that rings true to my own recollections and also, I think, offers some insights into the similarities and differences between American and Australian life.

The political division over climate change

A friend sent me this link  to a report of Senator Ted Cruz showing himself to know more about science and facts associated with alleged global warming than does the chair of the Sierra Club.

Looking for coverage of this story from other viewpoints simply confirmed that The Left  has its own facts and theories and The Right  has its own different facts and theirs, as I remarked in the inaugural post on this blog, A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?

In my view, Cruz is right on the science in this case but quite wrong in his politics. So I seem able to keep my science and my politics separate — but then perhaps that is not the case on every issue?

 

Who looks at evidence? Almost no one

I’ve been a crank for a long time about Loch Ness Monsters, frustrated because I can’t get people to look at Tim Dinsdale’s 1960 film which shows quite clearly a huge animal swimming in Loch Ness, submerging while still throwing up a massive wake.

For more than a decade, I’ve been a crank about HIV not causing AIDS, frustrated because I can’t get people to look at the clear evidence that HIV tests don’t track something infectious, and that the numbers in plain sight on the website of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, rates of sexual transmission at less than 1 per 1000 acts of unprotected intercourse, mean that HIV cannot cause an epidemic.

Now I’ve become a crank about human-caused climate change, frustrated because people won’t look at the clear evidence that carbon dioxide has been increasing steadily even as the global temperature was level or dropping form the 1940s into the 1970s, when the experts were predicting an Ice Age; and as the global temperature has not increased since the end of the 1990s.

Why don’t people look at evidence?

Because, I’ve finally realized, they don’t want to risk having to change their mind. There is no positive incentive and plenty of negative incentive. It’s beyond cognitive dissonance, which is to evade the significance of evidence after having come across it. It’s obviously even better not to have come across the evidence at all.

On human-caused climate change (HCCC), disbelief is expressed loudly and publicly by “conservatives” (in my view more accurately described as reactionaries) who have that opinion for the wrong reasons, namely the belief that economic free markets are the most important thing and regulating anything is bad.

“Liberals” or “progressives”, on the other hand (who are actually not liberal or progressive but simply knee-jerk politically correct) don’t look at the evidence because they don’t need to, it’s of no interest to them, they would take their stance that humans cause environmental damage no matter what. And they maintain perfect deniability, they are blameless, they were just accepting what the authorities, the experts, have been saying loudly and incessantly.

Most of my family and friends treat my “reactionary” stance on HCCC as a minor flaw, allowing me space because I tend to get caught up in Quixotic stuff all the time. They have no interest in looking at the evidence because they are completely comfortable with the notion of HCCC because it fits their anti-reactionary political views — which I happen to share. If it turns out that this HCCC is mistaken, there would be all sorts of undesirable consequences, in particular that reactionary views might appear to have been vindicated.

I was distressed when Stephen Colbert took HCCC as proven. I am not happy when all the MSNBC crowd does so, but they’ve become too extreme for me anyway and I rarely watch. But I was very unhappy when Jon Stewart took HCCC as proven. And Pope Francis may have been the last straw (in the wind, as far as ever changing public opinion). Though I did get a sort of sardonic enjoyment from the pundits who pointed out that the Pope knew what he was talking about because he had been a chemist. And I am getting continuing Schadenfreude over the contortions of the Republican presidential candidates as they are forced to comment on the Pope’s encyclical.

Evidence-seeking, I realize, is an obsession of perhaps the tiniest minority there is. On the dangers of modern medical practice, there are just a few dozen voices crying out publicly in the wilderness. On HIV/AIDS, there is our Rethinking AIDS  group of some dozens of people, with a few thousand more quietly agreeing. On HCCC, there are a few academic types like myself who got here because of the evidence, and who subsist uncomfortably in the association with people whose political and social views we do not share, to put it mildly.

I’m beginning to accept that none of the items in my bucket list will see the light of an enlightened day within my lifetime: Nessie discovery, rejection of HIV=AIDS, rejection of carbon-dioxide-is-hurting-us.

But I do remain curious about how the “authorities” will adjust when reality eventually catches up with them irrevocably.

[Corrected 8 August 2015 in paragraph 7]

Climate change is responsible for everything, as everyone knows (but what everyone knows is usually wrong)

Part of a sentence in a story in one of the nation’s leading newspapers speaks volumes about what’s wrong with the media, with established science, with public discourse, with government policy-making:

“parts of the country are experiencing increasing severe weather events and pest invasions, which scientists have tied to the affects of climate change”

No source given, of course, for “scientists”, as is the common habit nowadays in what passes for journalism.
As everyone knows, “climate change” in common contemporary usage means “climate change brought on by human activities, in particular generation of carbon dioxide”.
As everyone should know, there’s not a shred of reputable evidence to support the view that human activities are responsible for the historically inevitable increase in global temperatures, eventually by about 5-6°C over the next 100,000 years or so, as Earth rebounds from the last Ice Age (A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?; Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland, 2012: 18-26).
Nor is there a shred of reputable evidence to support the increasingly common assertion that rising temperatures are associated with an increased frequency of “unusual” climatic events.

The story’s header is “White House to unveil ‘climate hubs’ to aid farmers across country” (David Nakamura, Washington Post, 5 February 2014), illustrating how our government has swallowed the Big Lie pushed by a small proportion of self-interested careerist “scientists”, who have even managed to divert attention from the fact that their vaunted computer models have been wrong for the last 15 years or so — “Climate Scientist: 73 UN climate models wrong, no global warming in 17 years”; note also “NASA study proves CO2 cools atmosphere”.

I relished the “affects” instead of the presumably intended “effects”, since it reminds that all the bullshit * about “climate change” is a matter of emotions (affects) and not facts or good objective science. If it’s a typo, it illustrates the lack of good editing at a leading newspaper. If it is the author’s mistake, it illustrates the condition of our education system.

—————————————————
* Bullshit is now a perfectly respectable as well as useful term, thanks to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005. He defines it as assertions made without regard to whether or not they have any truth value, a very apt description of public shibboleths about global warming, HIV/AIDS, and any number of other topics where hordes of people, including journalists and public pundits, say things without thinking about them or actually knowing anything about them other than that “everyone knows” them; and “what everyone knows” is just what “authorities” have told them, authorities who understand that “Saying so, makes it so” (big file, loads slowly, sorry).