14 JANUARY 2010 – One of the favorite devices used by political scientists of the literal variety is the “doomsday” clock. According to the Telegraph, they’re resetting the thing today. In view of the rest of the news, especially in Haiti, this overtly political pseudo-scientific gesture seems even more trivial than usual. Nevertheless, if you want to know how close scientists predict we are to the abyss, you can sit on the edge of your seat, bite your nails, and watch it live on the internet. It’s the lab-coat crowd’s version of geezers-in-sneakers watching the Al Gore movie then screaming, “The world’s going to end!”
That part’s true. The world, this one anyway, is going to end. But when and how is the anybody’s-guess part. It’s science’s failure to predict Doomsday with any greater precision than the causes of weather fluctuations that keeps getting scientists in trouble. Horribly, Doomsday has come and gone for thousands of pitiful Haitians, for example. Where was science? Surely there have been earthquakes longer than there have been polar ice caps. Since “climate science” didn’t predict our wicked cold winter very well, maybe the billions we keep pouring on foggy but fashionable global-warming theories might have been much better spent figuring out why clever pups flee buildings minutes before the ground shakes. Those dogs! They can play poker. Maybe they can do science, too.
The leaked emails by angry, politicized Warmists – such as Penn State’s Michael Mann – document the hostility of scientific groupthinkers to the skeptics outside their charmless circle. That’s not terribly scientific, is it? But it’s the default mode of many scientists, especially when they’re challenged on the question of their authority. That authority, of course, is the the justification for funding. Authority is, or ought to be, predicated on demonstrated predictive abilities. Only a fool disputes proven science.
Even the best predictions, by definition, aren’t proven science. The Hadron collider, that huge Swiss toy that, when it runs at full tilt, may or may not swallow the Alps the way the earth swallowed Haiti, is a case in point. Scientists, who have billions in funding at stake, predict no ill effects because if they predicted otherwise – or even hinted at the slightest chance of disaster – they’d be doing something else with their time. Predicting weather or resetting Doomsday clocks, maybe. According to this account in MIT’s Technology Review, to characterize their critics, Hadron physicists, like Brian Cox, a Briton, now use terms that sadly have become scientific jargon. Question the accuracy of his predictions and you become a “twat.” Michael Mann couldn’t have said it better.
Worship of science is as shaky (and far less imaginative) as any other kind of religious belief – and shakier than some. It was a faith in science – or at least the enviro-romantic science of environmentalism – that banned DDT, bringing death to millions of the world’s poorest and weakest residents, despite a near-complete absence of proof that the ban would save even a single human life. That result could have been predicted, since DDT had demonstrated its usefulness. After all, that’s one of the reasons why Paul Hermann Müller was given the Nobel Prize in 1948 for discovering its effectiveness. Sentimental “science” defeats clinical science every time.
It’s not very rational, as Anthony O’Hear points out today here in the Fortnightly. Science’s ability to predict is the way we non-scientific types measure scientific usefulness. I don’t need a scientist to predict the sun will rise tomorrow – even though it may not, as it did not for thousands of poor Haitians.
– Denis Boyles
