Scientific fact is not determined by a vote. In this excellent speech from last January at Caltech, Michael Crichton explains how "concensus" science is a sham and a fraud upon the public and its legislators. Some of the fraud:
Global Warming is caused by Man.
Second hand smoke can kill you.
A nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter.
It's funny, just the other day I was listening to some moron answering listener questions on NPR. The caller asked if Global Warming was real. The "expert" immediately talked about a "consensus" among the scientific "community" that man is responsible to an increase in world temperature. No surprise from NPR.
Read the whole thing, but here's a good paragraph.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.And more specifically, a little bit on Global Warming:
The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."My emphasis. Lucky for us, Crichton is working on a book about this.
Speech found thanks to Instapundit.
