Re: <nettime> George Monbiot: Why the sudden surge in climate change denial?

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Chickens are coming home to roost for scientists. They have
squandered the credibility they earned in the early days of
public interest scientific research by craven work with the military
and corporations.

Horrible scientific consequences have come to the earth and
its inhabitants by unethical scientists, and the small number who
do public benefit work cannot match the deleterirousness of
harm caused by willingly captive, well-paid scientists and their
technological implementors, engineers.

Health-related scientists and technicians -- medical, pharmaceutical,
profit-making health entrepreneurs -- have become as untrustworthy
as mass-death weapons designers who still abet the huge worldwide
overkill of military and intelligence threat-generation and putative
defenses under the narcotizing rubic "national security."

Why scientists think they should be believed on the basis of
"scientific evidence" is not terribly different from why other
puveyors are hypnotized by their self-referencing conviction.

Scientific advocacy is on shaky ground when it cannot be readily
explained in common sense language rather than by complex,
arcane modelings which appear to be as much shamanism as
biblical certainty. Jiminy, the popularizing sci-fi movie by Al Gore
is shameful as shilling for the health industry.

It is no answer to smear the room temperature-IQ disbelievers.
That smacks of easy greasy condescension in lieu of considering
that scientists -- a huge special interest group -- deserve to be
cut down to size if they do not want to be seen as an infallible
priesthood.

A fundamental principle of good science is skepticism about
received wisdom, in particular those seers who predict doom
for humanity unless ... humans stop thinking for themselves.

The ratcheting up of climate doomsday has become ridiculously
herdlike, verily a mirror of climate change opponents. The stoning
of anybody who disagrees is despicable no matter who does it.

This is not to suggest that stoning is not a perfectly healthy
reaction against those who propound cures from apothecaries
of enlightenment (spit).


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