© Fernando Caracena, 2018
The Corruption of Science: What They Won't Tell You!
Inconvenient Facts About Global Warming | Alex Epstein and Stefan Molyneux
Science is a methodology, not an oracle. Scientists are human beings having the same limits as other human beings. As a result, they are sensitive to funding or defunding possibilities resulting from their research. In the past, earth shattering results came out of individuals working quietly in obscurity in remote parts of the world doing work that did not depend directly on their scientific efforts.
Today, funding of scientific projects is done largely by governments. To get funding, a young scientist must not only have good credentials, but the person's proposals have to be judged by older established scientists who either approve or disapprove of his proposal. If powerful individuals and organizations can get into the process and have their pick of who gets the funding, then after several generations of scientists, they can impose their own way of thinking onto the funding of science. Afterwards for young scientists, it is a matter of survival of the fittest. The young men that support the way of thinking of powerful people are the one's that get the funding; whereas those who don't, may end up driving an airport van. If that happens, powerful people can control the scientific agenda.
Climate Change is real,...BUT...
An example of the process described above is in the exaggerated guess (hypothesis) of climate change. The proponents of this idea are saying that the earth's climate is unstable and balanced on a knife's edge. The analogy would be that it has the kind of stability that a pencil has if balanced on its sharpened point. The tiniest perturbation could upset that balance.
Even a superficial study of the earth's geological history reveals that the earth's climate has indeed changed. It has undergone all kinds of extremes. Yet, the earth's climate has not become either like that of Venus or Mars. In primitive times, the earth had twenty times our atmospheric CO2 concentration, yet we did not become like the planet Venus. At one time the earth may have become like a giant snowball. At other times, it was warm and humid, full of giant trees and ferns. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. The geological evidence is that the earth's climate is quite stable. On the geological time scale it has wandered within broad limits, the extremes of which have not tested its stability over the past billions of years.
A scientific study of the earth's climate would try to determine what is the source of its climatic stability. But aside from that, what is important to us about climate change, is not the pimple that we may induce on the pachyderm, but what challenges on human survival we face as a result of the kind of climate changes that happened in the geological past.
If those that a financially obese, and therefore have political clout were truly interested in the future of humanity, they would not be playing the political angles that do humanity no good. Instead, they would try to insure that there was a good scientific discussion of the issues involving climate change. This means that there would welcome free exchanges of scientific opinion and unbiased funding of qualified scientists based on the soundness of their ideas and methodology.