“George Will is entitled to his own opinions. He is not entitled to his own facts.”
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“George Will is entitled to his own opinions. He is not entitled to his own facts.”
Comments are closed.
The paper involved a thorough review of the scientific literature of the day, in an attempt to move beyond the anecdotes cited by Will and others.
We found that, rather than predicting a coming ice age, the majority of researchers working in the 1970s thought greenhouse warming was likely to quickly dominate any factors that might be contributing to the short-term cooling then underway.
The problem with both methods of developing a “concensus” of scientific opinion, journal reviews of content and journal reviews of topic, is that both measure two things no one cares about: publisher/editor bias (a very strong driver in the scientific community), and funding.
And since science is a circular loop of funding going to what is topical and what is topical driving more funding – it suffers from well documented bias in the system. Not just on this issue, but any issue.
And so the observant layman watches what is supposed to be the impartial debate of scientific fact degenerate into the quest for funding, the quest to publish, and the barrage of vociferous name-calling from the semi-scientific community.
One cannot express any doubt about the most egregious piece of doggerel under the name of science if it supports GW without being lambasted as a “denier”.
And in this we expect our elected representatives to sort out noise from truth and “do something” effective, this is a man or woman who starts fund-raising for the next campaign minutes after election and is forced to let staffers do most of his thinking – generally following a party line having more to do with “winning” than doing right.
So anyone with half a brain simply drops back ten and punts – recognizing that the money, the personalities, and the power groups behind this have ensured that nothing effective and sensible will ever come of a process so fundamentally flawed.