Excellent articles, thanks for posting them and thanks for the thread.
What a depressing article (the Quadrant article, particularly).
Not depressing because, it is true, the hoax is unravelling (and that is GOOD) but depressing because there not just good people and good scientists who have allowed themselves to be taken in by this, but science in general.
There was a time when science was respected, and real scientists were perceived as having principles based on truth and reality. Whether true or not, the perception was there. And, after all, it wasn’t just perception. To make great inventions and discoveries, you generally have to see things factually. We used to have people inventing light bulbs and penicillin or discovering DNA. Now we have people inventing Facebook.
Now, like the article where the guy says his first reaction and focus won’t necessarily be the results of the science but a cynical “So, who funds you?”, scientists have been brought to the level of integrity of politicians, and that isn’t a good thing.
Sadly, too, there are many otherwise good people who went along with this because they trusted and believed in the science and the scientists. And those people contributed to the harm caused. They gave the political movements behind this de facto respectability.
In the end, the whole mess was about power and money. We may have avoided driving over that cliff and granting our rights and livelihoods lock, stock and barrel to Greenpeace and their ilk. The liberals overplayed their hand, like Chirac and his statement when he thought he was in a safe place to speak his mind about the AGW movement being the “First step towards global governance”.
Normally, we might sarcastically say “Gee, you say that like it is a GOOD thing...” when in actuality, he DID mean it as a good thing.
They bared their teeth a little too early, and in the end, we might just escape them.
As a scientist, trying to explain scientific matters here on FR, I constantly have to explain that medical science is not "climate change" science. People do paint all of us with very broad brushes that are simply not justified.
Although I guess that medical science does have its own version of "climate science"--for example, in nutrition science where too often, broad unsupported conclusions are made because a statistical correlation was found in a huge retrospective study. The problems there arise from the fact that many people--the authors of those studies included--do not recognize what those studies really do, and are often looking to prove predetermined outcomes by those studies.
Anyway, I could go on and on about the misuse of science to promote agendas...but I will stop here.
Sadly, this is but one of the fronts where we are being attacked.
Look no further than "gay rights" and the media blitz behind it to understand that the dissolution of the family is their real target.
Using science to denigrate and diminish the influence of the church is yet another front. The power of the state is being used to crush the "Little Sisters of the Poor" and the media is mum.
Abortion is the "sacrament" of all that's evil in this culture of death. Its the power of God and family that they most fear and it is these institutions they attack most ferociuosly.
Honor, integrity, valor are ridiculed and the only allowable heroes are anti-heroes; pigs and prostitutes.
Escape isn't an option.
“...there not just good people and good scientists who have allowed themselves to be taken in by this, but science in general.”
“Good scientists” by definition are driven to critically examine data and their own biases. They are much less likely to be taken in by a trendy theory that goes against what is clearly observable. For example, I once had a Nobel Prize winner in Physics publicly challenge some data I was presenting on an organism that could metabolize and grow on a certain pollutant. He claimed to have done the calculations and that it was impossible. All the control experiments and other clear evidence did not disuade him. We agreed to disagree. Several years later he admitted he was wrong. The point is when reality flies in the face of your calculations, a good scientist re-examines his calculations and premises.
Keep in mind that what you are describing is a symptom of the toolkit of Leftism. Call it Alinsky’s Rules if you like, but they’ve been used by communists going back at least to the French Revolution.
The Left started out attacking the funding of many in the basic sciences. The “science” didn’t matter, but the funding did. Corporate funding of basic scientific research, of the kind done pre-FDR, pre-progressivism in America, drove some of the most innovative products. The Left cannot have private success. It stinks of private property, thinking for one’s self, and the persistent liberty of a free mind. They loathe that.
So the funding, for the most “important” things, couldn’t come from private action. It needed public action. It needed government to remove the taint of bias.
Well, here we are.