Editor’s Introduction: It has been widely reported that President-elect Trump is considering cuts to NASA’s Earth division, which is a major source of “climate change” research. Broadly speaking, climate change research has become a cause favored by the political left and dis-favored by the political right.
The following article by Leo Goldstein is a strongly-stated criticism of global warming theory that focuses on the political left’s support for the theory.
One of the strongest and most longstanding political/social prejudices has been that Liberals represent Science and Reason, while Conservatives oppose them. This opinion was probably imported from Europe, where it had some ground in the Enlightenment period. But it has never been the case in America. The fact that overwhelming majority of post-WWII scientists held liberal beliefs is not evidence, because scientists comprised only a tiny minority of Liberal or Conservative supporters.
Over the last thirty years, in fact, Liberalism has been taken over by the hard Left, abandoned science and reason, and become a hotbed of obscurantism and oppression. The myth that Democrats were the party of science but Republicans were anti-science played a significant role in this downfall. One notable phenomenon is the rise of the so-called “postmodern science,” a product of cultural studies.
AL GORE’S WAR ON SCIENCE
Al Gore played a unique role in corrupting and degrading the American scientific enterprise. He belonged to the group of “Atari Democrats” who made an early alliance with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but Gore had neither aptitude not training in science. He was no friend of science. Gore compared science to the Faustian bargain:
“[W]e have chosen to escape the Malthusian dilemma by making a set of dangerous bargains with the future worthy of the theatrical legend that haunted the birth of the scientific revolution: Doctor Faustus. Some of these bargains have already been exposed …” (Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992, pp. 127-128)
In 1993-2000, Vice President Gore removed many distinguished, independent-minded scientists from the leadership of the American scientific community, replacing them with his political allies—especially from the environmentalist movement. For example, he fired Will Happer from the position of the Director of Science in the DOE, after Professor Happer suggested measuring the UV radiation impact of the alleged ozone layer depletion. This and other symptomatic cases are described in Michael Gough’s excellent book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking(2003). Gore’s staff further demanded that distinguished oceanographer Roger Revelle’s name be removed from an article against global warming alarmism that Revelle had co-authored. Gore’s unsuccessful attempts to intimidate Professor Fred Singer and to manipulate Ted Koppel, then an ABC anchor, were well-publicized as well.
But the media and academics believed that science had no enemies on the left, so these misdeeds were largely ignored. The publication of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article of deliberate gibberish phrased in politically correct cant to Social Text, and got it published), and similar expressions of academic dissent were too little and too late. Other processes leading to the corruption of National Academy of Sciences and scientific societies are outside the scope of this article.
“POSTMODERN SCIENCE” AND CLIMATE CHANGE
A scientific theory must match empirical observations. This is the essence of the scientific method, universally accepted for at least four centuries. Francis Bacon formulated it in 1620. A liberal arts education has long included sciences and required observations of nature or lab experiments. More recently, Karl Popper refined our understanding of the scientific method. It is currently accepted that any scientific theory must be testable (“falsifiable”) – the theory must have a non-trivial inference which is observable and can be demonstrated to be wrong (“falsified”) if the theory is incorrect. A theory contradicting natural or experimental observations must be rejected.
But then came “postmodern science,” with its constructivist epistemology, which declared science to be nothing more than what scientists say is true. In the postmodern framework, physical laws are just social conventions. If we were to take these postmodernists (or cultural constructivists) seriously, we would have to believe that gravity comes and goes as scientific opinion changes. This nonsense seems too absurd to do any real harm in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it has seriously harmed scientific institutions and scientific education, not least because it became a cornerstone of the climate pseudo-science. For example, the climate models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are “validated” by comparing their results to other IPCC models rather than to actual climate change data.
