Arkle wrote:
Right, sure. Because it's the Left that denies climate change, denies evolution, denies the failures of abstinence only education programs, denies the existence of transgender and intersex people, claims there's a link between abortion and breast cancer, claims hurricanes are God's punishment for gay people, thinks wind farms will slow the Earth's rotation...
*eyeroll*
Edited for tone. Simple mockery is adequate.
And here we have an example of just the sort of thing that causes what I was posting about originally. You care about
ideology, not if something is
scientifically valid. I bet you didn't even watch any of the stuff I posted, did you? You just contemptuously dismissed it without bothering to actually look at what is actually being said and then lumped it in with a
political ideology. This is why science is under attack by the left. When experimental evidence suggests something that does not fit their worldview, they just lump it in with other ridiculous things. Now, of course, the right does this as well -- ideologues are on both sides of the political spectrum -- but
they are not the ones with centers of power in academia. They
can't twist the process of science to spit out the answers they want. At best they can set up alternate academia which is also laughably poor (Crocoduck has a bunch of videos on these sort of things, too).
The fundamental thing about science is this: observation trumps all. It
does not matter what you
think should be right. You can't argue with it, you can't make Nature change her answer. If Nature says you are wrong then
you are wrong. This is why it's so difficult to be a scientist. Most people
can't admit to being wrong. Hell, even some scientists are tempted away from facing their wrongness, either through their own ideology or through outside pressure (no one pays for studies that don't confirm their biases, after all).
Case in point: Dr. William M. Gray. He was a pioneer in meteorological research and is credited with tropical cyclone forecasting. During the Clinton Administration, he was invited to a symposium led by Vice President Al Gore to talk about climate change. He agreed to come, but said that he didn't think there was enough evidence to support an anthropogenic source for climate change.
He was unceremoniously uninvited and mysteriously had his funding cut. Keep in mind, he didn't say it
wasn't the case that humans were the primary cause of climate change, merely that he didn't think that there was enough evidence to support such a claim at that time.
He would later become an opponent of anthropogenic climate change.
He was also an observational scientist and disdained climate modelling.
He was not a crack-pot. He was not an idiot. He was not being paid by some other ideological group (he ended up funding most of his climate research after his funding was cut entirely by himself). He was a scientist, but because he didn't toe the party line, he was ostracised.
This is the kind of damage the left is doing to one of the founding pillars of modern liberal civilization.