Scientists, present-day saints

A reader, who happens to be a good friend of mine, took exception to the very idea that scientists may collude to promote the global warming fraud.

“When they are engaged in science they employ Scientific Method and don’t simply look for results which confirm their bias or provide ammunition for activism,” she writes.

That remark made me feel envious. There are still people out there who haven’t divested themselves of ideals, retaining a most touching faith in the goodness of man. And not just man in general, but specifically the group combining the intellectual integrity of Scientific Method (always with initial caps) with the moral rectitude of unbiased commitment to truth.

Alas, I have long since replaced my own erstwhile idealism with the dyed-in-the-wool cynicism of someone who has lived too long and seen too much. One thing I’ve seen too much of is blind faith in science and its practitioners.

My own, blasé, observation of scientists yields an image of a group as venal, craven and corrupt as most, and more so than some. This becomes especially noticeable when scientists are co-opted to promote scaremongering hysteria, otherwise known as good causes.

Every such good cause has a bad effect: increased state power, higher taxes and lamentable diminution of liberty. And it can be shown that the scientists involved suffer from an acute case of the 10-year itch:

In the 1960s, they claimed that all oil would be gone in 10 years. In the 1970s, that another Ice Age would arrive in 10 years. In the 1980s, that acid rain would destroy all crops in 10 years. In the 1990s, that the ozone layer would be gone in 10 years. In the 2000s, that the ice caps would melt in 10 years. Now they are claiming that, unless we ‘stop oil’ this instant, ‘our planet’ will fry in 10 years.

The demonstrable falsehood of all the previous claims has to create at least some incredulity about that last one and – much as it pains me to say so – about the integrity of the scientists touting it.

Not that we should lump all scientists together. Take any social or professional group, and some of its members will be better, cleverer and more moral than others. In fact, one of the dirty tricks employed by the activists in all the causes mentioned above is portraying all scientists as a uniform group.

Almost any phrase starting with “Scientists agree that…” will end up peddling a lie. Scientists don’t always – in fact, hardly ever – agree about anything. And many of them mock the current climate craze for the fraudulent politicking is.

For example, Dr John Clauser, one of the world’s leading authorities on quantum mechanics and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, called the “climate emergency” campaign “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. Climate science, wrote Dr Clauser, has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”.

As far back as 2009, the Australian climatologist Ian Plimer published Heaven and Earth, a seminal scientific study that doesn’t so much argue as prove that the whole global warming fad is fraudulent. And in 2014 Prof. Plimer published another book, Not for Greens, adding more recent research findings that all prove the same thing.

Nor is this a case of isolated cranks. Anyone who proclaims that a broad scientific consensus on this issue exists is telling a lie. Thus, back in 2008, 31,072 [sic] American scientists signed a petition rejecting the existence of a global warming crisis.

“No such consensus or settled science exists,” said Arthur Robinson, founder and president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. “As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject” the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

The petition should have made front-page news, but obviously didn’t. The bandwagon of ideological orthodoxy was gathering momentum, and no one could be allowed to stick crowbars into the spokes of its wheels.

It takes a combination of idealism and myopia not to notice that universities, those traditional depositories and smithies of scientific truth, have become not only as corrupt as many other modern institutions, but more so than most.

Most scientists would sell their next of kin for a grant, a tenure or a higher post. They’ll flock like lemmings to any source of such emoluments – and pounce like jackals on those fingered by the source.  

It was in the proverbial groves that the fascistic trees of ‘cancel culture’ have grown to luxuriant maturity. Not only students but also their professors join forces to cancel the appearance of any guest speaker guilty of ever having expressed any other than woke, left-wing ideas (I could cite the examples of some of my friends, whose invitations to appear at the Oxford Union were withdrawn).

Any professor holding any other than received views sees a redundancy notice constantly looming on the horizon. And it’s next to impossible for a conservative academic to get a post at a major university. Ask yourself how many conservative sociologists you know and weep.

If you think this only affects the humanities, think again. The American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has written the book The Trouble with Physics, in which he criticises the string theory.

His scientific arguments take me out of my depth. However, what rings the alarm bells at a high decibel level is Dr Smolin’s comment that no physics department anywhere in the US will hire any opponent of that theory, no matter how sound his arguments and how extensive his research.

Similarly, no anthropology department will hire a scientist pointing out the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. Any biology department will refuse to employ – and may well fire if he is already employed – any scientist who insists that the biological differences between men and women can’t be corrected by scalpel and syringe. And so on, ad nauseum.

It’s not just that individual universities are corrupt. What John Henry Newman called The Idea of a University has been turned upside down and dumped headlong into the quagmire of modernity.

That point was confirmed – as if it required any more confirmation – this morning by a Sky interview with the Tory (!) Education Minister, whose name escapes me. He too had a complaint about our universities, but his was different from mine.

The problem with our institutions of higher learning, sighed the minister, is that too many students take useless courses, such as philosophy, history or medieval literature. That reminded me of an old joke the minister doubtless knows but kept to himself to preserve the solemnity of his message: “What do you say to a philosophy graduate? ‘I’ll have fries with that’.”

All students, insisted this Tory (!), should only take courses that can lead to “good job offers”. In other words, rather than trying to correct any deficit in their natural intelligence, students should devote their lives to the artificial kind, or anything else that pays.

The good minister must suffer from cognitive dissonance: he is confounding a university with a technical college or a trade school. A youngster would have no shortage of “good job offers” if he studied plumbing or hardware maintenance, respectable occupations both. But neither has much to do with the idea of a university.

Intellectual and moral corruption doesn’t bypass the academy on the way to government offices. As a minimum, we should be on our guard whenever a claim of a universal scientific consensus is made for any faddish cause. No disclaimers or qualifiers are necessary: all such claims are false.

That, however, in no way diminishes my admiration of my friend’s idealism. We need people like that, those looking for the saintly among the profane. There ought to be a counterweight to old cynics like me.