Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Neil deGrasse Tyson has claimed that the refusal of the Trump administration to bow to every scientific demand presented to politicians is a threat to democracy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says science deniers in White House are a profound threat to democracy
The scientist spoke out as thousands around the world prepare to march
One of America’s most influential and popular scientists has issued a stark warning over what he termed the Trump administration’s rejection of science – saying it is a threat to the country’s “informed democracy”.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the StarTalk podcast and TV show and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said when he grew up, the US had relied on science to drive its innovation. But no longer.
“People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable,” he says in a video posted on Facebook. “That’s not the country I remember growing up in. I don’t remember any other time where people were standing in denial of what science was.”
…
In my opinion, the problem with people like Tyson is they think they have a monopoly on being right. And there are a lot of reasons for thinking Tyson is not right about everything.
Climate Science in particular has an atrocious track record of failed predictions, dating all the way back to James Hansen’s exaggerated Scenario A.
Nothing bad is happening to the global climate, despite efforts by climate scientists to hype up every twitch of the thermometer.
The only tangible effect of anthropogenic CO2 to date is that CO2 is greening the Earth, stimulating faster plant growth, and more drought resilience across a broad range of species.
Claims by climate scientists that the science is “settled” are unconvincing.
To suggest it is unreasonable to have doubts about alarmist climate projections in the face of such a shambolic track record of failure and exaggeration in my opinion is pure arrogance – personal hubris dressed up as scientific opinion.
Video of Tyson explaining why it is wrong to disagree with him
Update (EW): Replaced the video above with a longer version of Tyson’s presentation
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The 3 climate stooges! The original three stooges probably knew more about climate scientist than they do.
+10^26
“Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elected Science Deniers Are a Threat to Democracy” Says the “man” who wants to shut down democracy so his fake religion can reign supreme.
Good read on conflating science, morals, and politics:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/21/the-march-for-science-shows-how-carl-sagan-ruined-science/#.WPy6Kk-woVk.facebook
Conservatives in UK want price cap on electricity….in the scientific sense, prices have doubled due to unreliable and very expensive renewables…
http://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUKKBN17Q0LR?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social
And the BBC didn’t allow anyone to comment when they reported that story.
They then had the temerity to wheel on a Green Party spokesman who started talking drivel about getting “cheap” renewables electricity to consumers. Not only is it not cheap, but the Green Party is normally antithetical to anything cheap because they want people to consume less of everything.
A lab coat and a TV show do not a scientist make. The photo above is of three high priests of the Church of Alarmist Climatology. Their proclamations are dogma, not fact, regardless of the intensity of their personal belief in their dogma or their animus toward non-believers. The photo in the link below is proof that we have not yet learned our lessons from history about the evils of state-sponsored science http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/images/highres_00007939%20copy.jpg . Science that is so sure of itself that it stops asking questions and only pushes answers, indulges in pogroms of religious orthodoxy, condones pseudo-intellectual bullying of skeptics, and seeks to empower itself politically is antithetical to the profession. I am thankful there remain true scientists dutifully collecting and examining evidence and courageously sharing their findings regardless of the reception they expect to receive from their peers, the public, or the halls of power.
The linked image is of the Communist Front resistance within Nazi Germany. As we know, both sides subordinated science to the state, not just for military tech, but for support of the murderous state ideology. Would be illuminating to have someone make a similar propaganda poster out of the selfie of the CAGW troika in the lede photo.
The photo above is of three high priests of the Church of Alarmist Climatology.
So where was Al Gore yesterday?
I wonder who will be the first rat to jump off the climate change bandwagon, the first one gets lauded for his or her courage, the rest forgotten.
jeanparisot at 5:51 am
I wonder who will be the first rat to jump off the climate change bandwagon, the first one gets lauded for his or her courage, the rest forgotten.
I’m not holding my breath.
They can Photoshop him in. Photoshopping is to images what Karlizing is to temperature records. Perfectly legitimate technique for climate alarmists.
People need to understand that to liberals, the truth is the liberal narrative about CAGW, not the CAGW science itself. Those are two very different things. Personally, I deny the narrative, not the science. Narratives, by definition, are always wrong. A recent example was the near universal liberal opinion that Hillary was going to win the election. Narratives exaggerate information that supports their position and ignore information that is against their position. Eventually, unless pure luck intervenes, every narrative implodes.
I am open to all truthful findings about the science.
Another posture with the consensus number.
This attempt by Tyson to take down the “deniers” is another attempt at a straw dog argument. Very popular with the left right now, because they know their real arguments are not popular. In their propaganda, everybody who opposes them is a sexual predator or a troglodyte. So they must be right. And the sneering Bill Maher types feel really good about not being a troglodyte or a dinosaur, so they willingly embrace the AGW lie.
Early in the video Tyson puts “climate science deniers” in the same category as anti-vaxxers, intelligent design, and anti-GMO activists. Very clever, if he included JFK assassination conspiracy theorists and 9/11 truthers he could include just about the entire population. A recent study on conspiracy ideation that I read in a book about it, “Suspicious Minds”, Rob Brotherton https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZFZC5X0/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o08_?ie=UTF8&psc=1 says that just about everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. There are leftist ones and rightist ones.
But by calling “climate science deniers” anti-scientists he neatly sidesteps the need to provide any facts or reasoning. He puts them in the same category as young earth creationists and neatly dismisses the entire subject. It is the same trick as the stupid science march. They are “marching for science” in opposition to whom? Who is saying science in general is not good? Who are these mythical “science deniers”? Just straw doggies invented by the left to explain their failures.
Then he goes on to explain how science works, though his idea of peer review is completely scrambled. To hear Tyson describe it, peer review is done by scientists who disagree with the paper being reviewed, and who do actual science to prove or refute it. Very far from the “pal review” that really happens, and even when real peer review is in place it is just a check. The calculations are not redone etc. It makes me suspect that Mr. Tyson has not submitted many papers…
The video is just a clever bit of propaganda. I don’t know anyone who really denies science. Facts are facts, but if facts become inconvenient you can always call the truth teller a bad name. Works in 6th grade, and that’s as far as many of these rabid lefties ever got.
This is the very best propaganda piece I’ve seen for a long time. Tyson’s scriptwriter frames the debate, in his terms, right from the start.
The industrial revolution started, mainly but not exclusively, in Britain. It began when engineers invented heat engines that converted the energy from coal into mechanical energy which could do useful work which was previously done by humans and animals. (We still measure output in horse-power.) In some senses it could be argued that the scientists of the day then subsequently unearthed and refined the principles on which the heat engines worked so their performance could be improved. Of course the theoretical scientists of the day certainly did make discoveries in their own right that turned out to be useful which gave us things like electricity.
However Tyson kicks off telling us it was all ‘science’ (and seemingly had nothing to do with energy). He then quickly and artfully diverts away from this to stop his audience thinking with a long, convoluted description of what his scriptwriter wants us to think science is by talking a lot of non-science!
The last thing the globalists want us to realise that cheap reliable abundant energy is the bedrock upon which our modern civilisation stands and that the cheaper the energy is the better-off we all will be.
The Global Warming boondoggle is all about pushing up the cost and reducing the reliability of energy supplies. This explains why we have wood-chips being carted from America to fuel the Drax power station in Britain. Somehow this is ‘good for the planet’ even though it results in an over-all increase in the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere compared with what we would get burning coal because wood chips are ‘sustainable’.
One suspects that it also explains why certain countries like communist China get a free pass on all this nonsense.
If anyone reading this is still worried about Global Warming all I can say is watch the weather! If the sun’s behaviour continues on its current path it will soon become blatantly obvious that mann made carbon dioxide doesn’t keep us warm.
Government climate “scientists” are similar to the educated clergy of the monarchs who provided the arguments for the king’s divine right to rule. By supporting power they were allowed to share in the plunder of the king. Climate scientists get to share in the plunder receiving far more than they would deserve for their services. The deity they serve the “federal government” can then get the peasants to voluntarily give up their freedom and property rather than using the sword.
“Government climate “scientists” are similar to the educated clergy of the monarchs who provided the arguments for the king’s divine right to rule.” Oop, there it is.
More like witch doctors or soothsayers from more ancient times. Divining patterns in chicken bones or the entrails of sheep to determine the future. Gather ’round boys! It’s all in the pitch!
“People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable,”
Well, Tyson certainly has so I can’t argue with him on that statement.
Perhaps more importantly, peope have not lost that ability and Tyson is very aware of the fact that people know his politics determine his science. That’s why scientists are elevating themselves to the level of gods to keep their political power.
Ignorant has-beens who assume someone else did the work right without checking it are a waste of time too.
I am just staggered by the Olympic standard arrogance of these people. Arrogance combined with scientific illiteracy and no evidence is a potent mix.
For real physics, I prefer Dyson to Tyson. What a difference one letter makes.
I have much respect for Dr. Dyson, but his spheres are a myth–not scientifically feasible.
Jim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_BaconThe Stapledon-Dyson spheres are not something that Freeman Dyson believes, for Chrissakes; Olaf Stapledon mentioned them in his
SF novel, Dyson made a brief mention that aliens might make swarm habitats around a star to better utilize solar energy, and maybe we could look for reradiated waste energy and a bunch of people made it into magical full spheres around stars. Jeez, look it all up.
Offtopic, but an answer. Sorry.
The problem is that such structures (Dyson Spheres) cannot orbit a star. The gravitational force inside a hollow, spherical shell is everywhere zero. All you need is basic calculus to prove it. This is true for any force that follows the inverse-square law. The electric force inside a charged, hollow, metal sphere is also zero. It’s why Van de Graaff generators work since the inside of the sphere is at ground potential.
Jim
Timothy Ball is right.
If there is any threat to democracy, it is the Green Doctrine that not only will put us out of coal, diesel and gasoline but also out of food.
It needs the mind set of a sociopath to make claims like Tyson.
May he burn in hell.
Those 3 are absolute avatars of selfie culture, God help us.
Unelected deniers of science like you Neil, are a bigger threat!
The “March for Science”., besides being a rerun of Lysenko, reminds me of Carl Sagan and the “Nuclear Winter” theme of the 1980’s. Tyson is not the scientist Sagan was, but he is every bit as political.
For these guys “Democracy” is the freedom to confabulate reality.
thousands around the world prepare to march….
oh for God’s sake….horse puck
….and billions did not march
It’s the same people at every march…..their street party
The claim that the science is settled is not only ridiculous it is a last resort argument by frustrated warmists following endless failed graphical predictions of doom.
Email notification of new comments doesn’t seem to work anymore; is that because the science is settled?
Dupe the young first and use them in the power play. Then tell the wise and experienced and moneyed older ones what to do while conducting the taking exercise.
Obama, the real Flat Earth Society spokesman.
The Flat Earth Society: Still going strong.
Obama the spokesman, so what can go wrong?
All his “Carbon pollution”
is a Marxist collusion.
It’s food for the hungry, so let’s get along. https://lenbilen.com/2013/08/05/obama-the-real-flat-earth-society-spokesman/
“People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable”
That is right. The problem is that the scientific institutions have not identified the principles that make people able to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable.
See Science or Fiction´s principles of science (v7.5):
§1 A scientific argument consists of clearly stated premises, inferences and conclusions.
§2 A scientific premise is verifiable. Premises and their sources are identified and readily available for independent verification.
§3 A scientific inference is logically valid.
§4 A scientific conclusion is deduced by application of axioms, definitions and theorems or measured properties and scientific concepts that have already been verified or validated.
§5 A scientific concept consists of statements that are logically valid conclusions deduced from premises that are themselves logically valid conclusions, axioms, definitions or theorems.
§6 A scientific concept is well-defined and has a well-defined capability of prediction within a well-defined context.
§7 A scientific concept can only be validated by comparison of predictions deduced from that concept with measurement results. Whenever predictions differ from measurement results, by more than the combined uncertainty of the measurement results and the claimed capability of the concept, there must be something wrong with the concept – or the test of it.
§8 A scientific concept can only be referred to as validated for the context covered by the validating tests.
§9 A scientific statement is based on verifiable data. Data and precise information about how that data was obtained are readily available for independent verification. Whenever data are corrected or disregarded, both uncorrected and corrected data are provided together with a scientific argument for the correction.
§10 A scientific measurement report contains traceable values, units and stated uncertainty for well-defined measurands in a well-defined context.
§11 A scientific prediction report contains values, units and claimed capability for well-defined measurands in a well-defined context.
The problem for activitsts and advocates is that by these principles a concept can no be propounded by:
– appeal to consensus
– appeal to authority
– appeal to expert judgement