James Delingpole writes at the Telegraph:
The background to all this – and the “97 per cent of climate scientists say….” meme – is expertly covered in a new paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Andrew Montford.
In a sane world it wouldn’t have needed writing. An obscure green political activist called John Cook and a few of his eco-cronies produced a pseudo-scientific paper so riddled with flaws that it ought to have been tossed straight in the bin. Instead, it was bigged up by a compliant mainstream media, a desperate and propaganda-hungry green industry, and by the US President as a vitally significant meta-analysis offering indisputable proof of the scientific “consensus” on “climate change.”
Montford concludes:
“The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent. The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate.”
So how do the bastards go on getting away with it?
No political system is perfect, and the biggest flaw in a fully-enfranchised democracy is the prevalence of uninformed voters. Arguably the most counter-intuitive aspect of the scientific method is that nothing can be proved. Certainty is itself unscientific, but if you place two people in front of an uneducated audience, one of them saying they are certain, the other saying they don’t know, the audience will tend to believe the first. People crave certainty. The majority of people have neither time nor inclination to independantly research and verify the statements of self-proclaimed experts. They accept what they were taught in fifth-grade science class and rely on confirmation bias to screen everything else. Couple that with the desire to be part of an important majority and the masses will gladly eat up whatever you tell them. The tricks are shamefully similar to your average late-night infomercial.
Eisenhower warned us against the science-government complex.
Consensus is not a vital part of science, as the warmists would have us believe. In 1904 the consensus opinion on physics was Newton. In 1905 Einstein published his article on Special Relativity. One guy who wasn’t even a professional scientist, against literally the entire physics community. He was right, they were wrong. Science is never about consensus. if it were we would still be living in caves, because the consensus was “fire bad”. Science is predicated on ‘I think the consensus is wrong’.
Science is NEVER about consensus. Science is about learing things no one else believes.
“how do the bastards go on getting away with it?”
My grandmother taught me that if I always tell the truth, then I will become very uncomfortable with lies, and I will be able to tell instantly when people are lying to me. On the other hand, if I were to lie often enough to become comfortable with lies, then I would lose the ability to tell the lies from the truth. This makes liars far more gullible than their intellectually honest peers. Someone who repeats a lie may not know they are lying, but they are liars just the same because they can’t tell the difference.
Unfortunately the ‘main stream media’ has become so infested with liars, all the way up to the Editors-in-Chief, that most honest reporters have had to flee to the Internet to make their voices heard.
“So how do the bastards go on getting away with it?” My question exactly.