More on Behind the Hockey Stick
I have got around to reading the article
Scientific American: Behind the Hockey Stick
Seven years ago Michael Mann introduced a graph that became an iconic symbol of humanity's contribution to global warming. He has been defending his science ever since
My own thoughts on this matter are that science has come into conflict with the ruling ideology of Capitalism and one of them must give way. Since the Capitalists control the State with its instruments of terror, I would say that the scientists would have to give way. This is not strictly true as there is a significant minority faction of the ruling class who would benefit from tackling climate change. I think this faction would like to preserve Capitalism in a 'nicer' form.
There is a Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy by Michael Mann et.al.
I think I understood what it was all about.
2 comments:
Hi, I'm the anonymous that linked to "Abuses of Skepticism" before.
I've been picking up a similar vibe (for the last year or so) on the conflict of science and conservatism. I think here (in the US) it starts with the anti-evolutionists and rolls very naturally to a distrust of global warming scientists.
Once you start rejecting science, why stop?
Anyway, Neal Stephenson (a clever author) joins us in this fear (link):
"For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture."
I have opened a new thread at Science vs Religion
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