First Published on Townhall.com

In his recent article “The Threat to the Scientific Method,” Dr. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist who for 30 years was Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and now directs the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, pointed to a serious problem: the corruption of science through government (and sometimes industry) funding, which has led to rapidly and alarmingly increasing numbers of retracted journal articles. In light of that trend, he asks, “If we can no longer trust science, what do we have as the basis for knowledge?”

Pat is a friend of mine, and I respect him tremendously for the quality of his scientific work as well as for his courage as a critic of global warming panic. But I think the problem behind the spate of retracted articles runs much deeper than his article suggests.

The problem is in thinking that science is “the basis for knowledge.” It isn’t. It never has been. It never can be.

That is because science—in terms of scientific method, testing hypotheses by real-world observation—cannot justify any truth judgments based solely on empirical observation….

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