A few days ago I began reading Harold J. Berman's Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983). It's a scholarly tour de force covering an amazing range of subjects in law, history, theology, ecclesiology, and even the rise of science (particularly how Christian thought generated that). These paragraphs, from pages 155--6 and 157--8, particularly caught my attention: Although science, in the modern Western sense, has usually been defined only in methodological … [Read more...]
Should we trust science?
Naomi Oreskes’s book Why Trust Science? (2019) has been described as a defense of science, but it is nothing of the sort. The cornerstone of her thinking is total consensus determining truth in the natural world. Her approach is a scorched earth epistemology. 1. Science and the Oscars I write this while my wife is watching the Oscars. The music of professional musicians and overwrought thank-yous drift to me along with the dependably-boring, routinely inappropriate political … [Read more...]
Climate Science Is Changing from Alarmism to Realism
Climate science is about to make a tectonic shift. Here is why. Lately, political groups have heavily influenced climate science. Carbon dioxide emissions from anthropogenic sources such as coal plants and industries have been accused of causing a dangerous increase in global temperature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—alarmists’ preferred source for the scientific understanding of climate change—has become a ministry of propaganda. Policies it advocates, like the … [Read more...]
Whom to Trust? NASA GISS, NASA, or Cornwall Alliance?
After citing a couple of Cornwall Alliance's articles in discussion, an educator friend got this response from one of his former students: The problem with referencing the Cornwall Alliance to discredit statistics from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is that one (the Cornwall Alliance) is a political advocacy organization with no scientific relevance while the other (NASA) has the weight of objective fact and science behind it. To me there is virtually no legitimate way one can … [Read more...]
Murder of the Scientific Method and Free Speech
As The Washington Times recently reported, a University of Colorado (at Colorado Springs) professor recently told his class that no debate would be allowed on climate change. The course is entitled, Medical Humanities in the Digital Age (whatever the heck that means and whatever the heck that has to do with climate change). The professor went on to quote a completely bogus statistic that is an ongoing favorite of climate alarmists saying, “Opening up a debate that 98% of climate … [Read more...]
What’s Wrong with Science Behind Global Warmings Fears?
Bad science is the foundation of fears of dangerous, manmade global warming and therefore of any policy recommended to reduce it. If you’re like many Americans, you find that position surprising, because you’ve heard that many national academies of science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and an alleged overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientists say the opposite. So why should you judge that the skeptics are right and all those others are … [Read more...]
Big Green at it Again: Deciding Scientific Outcomes Before Doing Research
As if Climategate wasn’t enough, the pseudo-scientific community has now given us BeeGate. Environmentalists blame neonicotinoid pesticides for bee colony collapse, an assumption already disproven by scientific research and field studies. This is not to say that more studies could not or should not be done, but in the case of BeeGate there is an ideology at work that decided the outcome. According to a memo released Tuesday, four European scientists decided they wanted to stop the use of … [Read more...]
