Agenda Science

Here`s a good one:


THE 'POST-NORMAL' SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Melanie Phillips, 14 March 2007 http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1469

From the horse’s mouth — climate change theory has nothing to do with the truth. In a remarkable column in today’s Guardian, Mike Hulme, professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory but who a short while ago warned that exaggerated forecasts of global apocalypse were in danger of destroying the case altogether — writes that scientific truth is the wrong tool to establish the, er, truth of global warming. Instead, we need a perspective of what he calls “post-normal” science:
"Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs where the stakes are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent, and where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken. It has been labelled “post-normal” science…The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow."
Indeed! Facts first, conclusions afterwards is the very basis of scientific inquiry. But not any more, it seems, where the religion of global warming is concerned. Here facts have to fit the theory. Hulme goes on:
"Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity."

What an admission! Let’s read that one again. "Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking." Of course not. The facts don’t support it. It’s not true. So, says Hulme, let’s abolish the need to establish the facts and the truth and impose the theory on the basis of — what’s that again — “values and beliefs.” In other words, climate change science has got to be anti-science. It’s got to be anti-truth. It’s got to be nothing more than an ideology.

Post-modernism long ago deconstructed truth. Now in similar vein, “post-normal” science deconstructs scientific empiricism and rationalism and detaches science from truth. In other words, where science fails to support an ideology, the absolute and overriding imperative of putting that ideology into practice means that science has to suspend its very essence as a truth-seeking activity and instead perpetrate lies. That is the inescapable implication of Hulme’s position. To support the bogus claim that we face the imminent collapse of civilisation from global warming, science itself has to be reconceptualised as an instrument of propaganda and justified by mendacious and obfuscatory post-modernist jargon. Hulme concludes:
"Climate change is too important to be left to scientists - least of all the normal ones."
So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth, and “post-normal” scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.