Wednesday 15 July 2015

Quote of the Day: On the climate war’s damage to science

“For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.
    “Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.
    Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.”

- Matt Ridley on ‘The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science,’ in QUADRANT

1 comment:

jackndc said...

there have been too many examples of respected climate scientists being ostracised for violating AGW dogma and having their funding cut or career destroyed for AGW to be called science any longer.