[From article]
Stephen Schneider, a highly regarded climate scientist explained the need to lie for justice to Discover magazine:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
[. . .]
Lomborg wrote the hugely-influential-and-therefore-despised book The Skeptical Environmentalist. An honest and by all accounts decent man and academic, Lomborg was a former hard-green environmentalist. In 1997, he set out, with the aid of some students, to disprove the work of Julian Simon, the environmental optimist. Unfortunately for Lomborg, it turned out the dragon he set out to slay was on the right side.
[. . .]
Galileo’s greatest and most-enduring enemies were not the orthodox clerics of the Church, but his fellow scientists. This was not a case of a superstitious, bureaucratic Church snuffing the light of reason. It was a case of petty and jealous men trying to use the Church to kneecap a whistleblower. If Galileo’s way of things won the day, a lot of people would have looked like fools and, possibly, lost their jobs. And, this had less to do with Copernicanism or heliocentricity than with the fact that Galileo represented the introduction of mathematics into the world of physics. Needless, to say, if you were a physicist who didn’t know jack about math and, all of a sudden, this guy was going to make math a requirement, you’d be bummed.
[. . .]
In 1597, Galileo wrote a letter to Kepler admitting that he believed Copernicus had it right, but he was afraid to admit it publicly for fear of being ridiculed by Aristotelian scientists — not persecuted by closed-minded clerics.
[. . .]
you cannot call the Galileo affair a battle between the Church and science when “science” — in its heart and ambition — was harsher on Galileo than the Church was.
[. . .]
more scientists probably have been stopped from pursuing research because “of defiance of conventional wisdom in America since World War II with its accompanying bureaucratization and politicization of science than existed in the whole of the world in Galileo’s day.”
[. . .]
Today, such institutions and associations are deeply invested in massive political and economic arrangements which require that Lomborg be wrong, if he is scientifically right.
Ultimately, the proper way to view the Galileo episode is not of a religious orthodoxy persecuting a martyr to scientific truth, but the forces of scientific orthodoxy using the state to punish a whistleblower.
[. . .]
The more-important word in the phrase “scientific community” is not scientific but community, because it is that word which reminds us that scientists are humans. And — surprise — humans are creatures of ego, jealously, and vindictiveness. Galileo himself was an egotist of the first order, which is one reason so many scientists despised him. But by shifting the blame for what happened to Galileo away from the scientific community and onto the Church, scientists — and in a sense the entire secular establishment — have absolved themselves of any culpability. This is not only unfair to the Church; it’s very, very dangerous for science, because it perpetuates a myth that the “sophisticated mind” is immune to inquisitorial zeal.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/205503/starry-enviro/jonah-goldberg
JANUARY 13, 2003 8:45 AM
Starry Enviro?
The cases of Björn Lomborg and Galileo.
By Jonah Goldberg
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