The Importance of Supporting Real Science in the Battle Against Narrative Science
Dr. Matthew Wielicki: “There’s a disconnect between what the science says and what the narrative in the mainstream media is….and what certain ‘activist scientists’ have been pushing.” Other scientists share his concerns.
by Leslie Eastman – January 7, 2024
Occasionally we are asked why Legal Insurrection features so much science among the articles featuring court cases, legal analysis, and updates on our push-back against Critical Race Theory and Diversity-Equity-Inclusion in education.
While there are many reasons, perhaps the chief one is that true science is being twisted to support political narratives that are destructive, both to our nation and to humanity. For example, the Twitter Files shed light on the degree to which good information from epidemiologists and physicians was suppressed during the covid pandemic.
Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services collaborated in a “censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.”
Disinformation warriors worked overtime to suppress “false” claims about the side effects of COVID vaccine, especially the true claims. Since the Food and Drug Administration officially (and speedily) approved COVID vaccines, any reports of side effects were automatically disinformation.
People are now challenging climate change narratives, which are proving to be just as incorrect, if on a different time scale. And this brings me to an excellent video from Prager University featuring Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a geologist and climate expert.
Wielicki was born in Poland while it was still under communist rule, so he has a deep appreciation for freedom of speech and personal liberty. His parents worked at California State University- Fresno at a time when professors and students were allowed to have different opinions about the issues of the day.
Another believer in freedom in science is Roger A. Pielke Jr., who recently prepared an exceptional column on ten principles for effective use of math in policy research.
It was his eighth entry on torturing data that caught my eye.
I don’t know who said it, but there is an old adage that says if you torture data enough, it will confess. Simple methods, shared data, easily replicable, with clear meaning are always going to be preferable in policy settings to complex methods, unavailable data, impossibility of replication with unclear meaning.
Both the natural and social sciences are guilty of unnecessary complexity in research design and implementation. A good example is the so-called “social cost of carbon” which employs mind-numbingly complex methods to arrive at results that can really be whatever you’d like them to be, simply by tinkering with assumptions and methods.
The hard sciences are canaries in the coal mine. If their data-driven conclusions, which should be experimentally reproducible, can be manipulated and massaged to promote ideological and/or political narratives resulting in elite policy objectives that affect us all, then no science (especially, it goes without saying, the social sciences) can be trusted.
If our leaders and our media want us to trust The Science™, then The Science™ must be trustworthy. Results must be replicated, data should be offered freely, and methodology must make sense.
Ultimately, though, I will leave the final word on the leftist march through the institutions—here, of science—to climatologist Judith Curry who confirms the climate “crisis” is manufactured.
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” climate scientist Judith Curry tells me.
She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
…“The origins go back to the . . . UN environmental program,” says Curry.
Some United Nations officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”
The UN created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.”
“Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding . . . assuming there are dangerous impacts.”
The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about “man-made climate change.”
As we enter into the New Year, I am grateful that the message and facts associated with real science are now less likely to be throttled on X. Alternative media continues to help support more rational interpretations of atmospheric, oceanic, and earth sciences.
Today’s bad science is intended to become tomorrow’s freedom- and America-destroying law, so I will continue to bring science and technology news to Legal Insurrection readers.
