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4 January 2004  

Crichton Enlightens

I just got around to reading Michael Crichton's "Aliens Cause Global Warming" speech that's been making the blog rounds lately. It is excellent. Among the many good points he makes:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

[W]e now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions.

It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

10:21 PM |

Mrs. Black on the Greens

Barbara Amiel writes in the Telegraph:

Last December 17, the Guardian published its Eco gongs. The author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, won an award that cited his "scientific dishonesty" and described his book as "not comprehending science". That citation came from a report on Lomborg's book by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). Their condemnation followed an 11-page trashing of Lomborg's book in the influential Scientific American.

In one of those coincidences that all journalists dread, the Guardian published its put-down of Lomborg on the very day that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation heavily criticised the DCSD's negative verdict as "completely void of argumentation". Unsurprisingly, the Guardian did not publish the news of Lomborg's reprieve.

08:56 PM |

Art for a Sunday Afternoon

Art historian Lee Sandstead has some excellent pictures of the South African War Memorial on University Ave. here in Toronto, the top of which is seen in the picture currently 2nd from the top over in the right-hand column. (Here's a closeup of the bit you can see in my picture.) He has lots of other pictures of sculpture, painting, and architecture, too. Seeing his photos reminded me that I took this picture of Bouguereau's The Young Sherpherdess when I was in San Diego last summer. The color is probably all wrong and it's not that sharp (cf. Lee's great pictures), but it's better than others I've managed to find with Google.

12:02 PM |