On previous blogs, Twitter, Facebook and in various pubs sharing beers with friends I've long lamented the death of science and the scientific model. Of science, I've always been somewhat of a fan. Growing up in Midland, Texas I was in close proximity to the McDonald Observatory and my best childhood friend dreamed of having a job there. We also had a thing for chemistry. It's a miracle that we all walked away without major physical damage as we often tried combining common household chemicals in an attempt to create the greatest ant-killer man has ever seen.
As I grew into my teens, and in Jr. High and High School, I continued taking advanced science classes despite the fact that I was more suited to arithmetic (as my current accounting career testifies) than I was jumping onto the calculus and spinning the universal bottle. Even though I'm currently out of the science game, I never truly lost interest in its practice, nor have I stopped being amazed by the discoveries it produced.
In recent years I've been dismayed. Science, as I learned it, is dead. When Al Gore convinced the scientific community to help make him and his investors filthy rich (and, conduct one of the greatest long-cons ever on humanity) the scientific method as we knew it ran into a corner and coalesced with the Dodo bird over a nice Pimm's. Gone were observation and hypothesis to be replaced with faulty hockey-sticks, computer models that ignored the principle of GIGO and monolithic quasi-governmental agencies who decided who could, and who couldn't, make observation of fact. From open sharing sprang a herd of Mini-Lord Kelvin's convinced that everything which needed to be invented already has. A natural, cyclical, trend was immediately basterdized and attributed entirely to man's 3% contribution wrapped up neatly in a nice-cinematic Inconvenient bow that contained several easily-identifiable factual errors.
A bigger concern (to me) was that the conversation around climate-change switched from "what can we do when it gets here?" to "how are we going to stop it?" Overnight green became not a color but a movement and a (dodgy) political party and before we knew it the world was on about "carbon footprints" and a host of other items that were a.)Pretty impossible to truly quantify and b.)Not going to matter much in the grand scheme of things. Don't believe me? Go see how much carbon it takes to manufacture the "green" Toyota Prius.
They say that all serious movements are finished the moment they become a status symbol, and this is what happened to the Green movement. Once Hollywood got their claws dug in, it was pretty much over for those of a conservation persuasion as the ecomentalists were here, and in a big way. The biggest problem, due to the fact that the movement has no real science behind it, is that you can't shame a carnival barker. That's why Al Gore's house generates more carbon than Mexico and he sold his eco-TV network to the Middle-East oil magnates and still can stand up and give a speech about the "tipping point" without immediately dropping dead of shame. It's why Thomas Friedman still has a job despite being wrong on almost every economic statement he's made and living in a palatial home that would make Midas blush. At least, when the sea wouldn't stop despite his commands, King Canute learned something about humility before God. Al Gore and his minions seem to thrive on the very act of being proven wrong.
The downshot of all of this is that science, real science, is all but extinct. What's even worse however is that the pseudo-science that we're left with can't even get their fake conclusions right.
After all, we all know that all of the jerks who used to drive BMW's have now moved on to the much more stylish Audi.
