Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Phil's Unified Theory on the Rise of Progressivism

You know, I think in general soft-science academics spend far too much time coming up with thories to support their world-view and then scouring the landscape for "facts" that they can rationalize to support said theories. They publish the resulting paper and the theory is now dubbed "fact".

This happens again and again with studies incestuously referencing each other, and eventually some of their students run for office and win.

2 comments:

Cylar said...

Oh, you mean like how the IPCC or whatever it was, published the results of their climate-change study BEFORE actually doing the research?

I've got bad news for you Philmon...while the "soft sciences" may be guilty of this cart-before-the-horse mentality, the "hard" ones aren't much better.

philmon said...

Well, the dirty secret is that the IPCC is a political construct, and the summaries were pre-determined. There is a very powerful soft-"science" layer between the actual scientists and the public face of the IPCC.

The summaries have never been consistent with the science in the papers studied and written for it. Many scientists complained. Some left. Dr. Lindzen was one of them. Roy Spencer was another. There were more. But the IPCC -- that is, the public face of it (which again, is political -- it is a political construct of the U.N.) would just respond "but we have 2,500 other scientists who agree". Which was bunk as well. None of those scientists were ever asked (in any official, documentable way) if they agreed with the conclusions. They didn't sign anything. They reviewed literature, sent their findings to the summary writers, and then the summary writers proceded to write what they wanted to write and claim that they based it on the input of "scientists" -- who weren't even all scientists, and many of those weren't climate scientists -- but scientists who were there to prognosticate on the possible effects of the foregone conclusion of global warming.

We've been saying this for years, but few would listen. The media smeared dissenters as corporate stooges and backward thinkers, "deniers" -- but that got harder to do after the leak of the emails last fall.

But they're still trying, of course.

After Scott Brown was elected, many said "Health Care is Dead", but Obama and the Dems pressed on with their allies in the press providing cover-fire and they "passed" it anyway.

Ok, we've seen this movie once. They will attempt the same with Cap & Trade. Even though the IPCC "research" has been exposed as fundamentally fraudulent now, they will pretend it isn't and charge ahead. We must not let our guard down.