While Nanny Pelosi uses the Gulf oil blowout as a political tool to push a "moral imperative" to move ahead with energy reform, some scientists note that oil is a natural phenomenon that is always present in our oceans. While politicians like Nanny push forward, scientists are backing away from the portrayal of catastrophe.
They're also backing away from the politicized version of Mann-Made Global Warming: The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
Golly, it looks like experts such as AlGore and David Appell (our local expert on all things related to climate change) didn't get that whole science thing right, after all. No wonder they've been so quiet of late. Davey used to trot through blogs, pointing out how stupid we all are and extolling his vast expertise regarding the religion science of Anthropogenic Global Warming, yet oddly has been missing in action of late. Perhaps this explains his absence.
“Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect...."
I get the impression that the only group for whom the "science" is "settled" consists of those scientists who have hitched their tenures to the notion that it is, in fact, settled.
"And now, we're going to find all the data we can to support that notion."
Posted by: ZZMike | May 30, 2010 at 02:24 AM
Not just their tenures, but their grant funding. That's the interesting thing about science today - if you don't pull down grant money, you lose your place in academia.
The only way to obtain grant money is to ensure that your proposals are in line with prevailing "expert" theology.
A person I worked with wrote an excellent paper documenting the flehmen response in elephants, but experts consistently redlined it because they knew that elephants don't exhibit a flehmen behavior. She got it published as a cover story in SCIENCE only after referring to the behavior as a "flehmen-like response".
As it turned out, our work demonstrated conclusively the importance of chemocommunication in the animals, which had been discounted previously.
Posted by: Max | May 30, 2010 at 05:58 PM