Retiring Science

Friday, November 8, 2024

Retiring Science

The ideal of science is that it’s the search for truth, using reproducible methods, well documented, and open for discussion. The government funds a lot of science research through grants. This has always permitted politics to determine the direction of research, and ultimately also the findings.

The environment, as an object of government care, has come to be reduced to the earth’s climate. All the multinational non-profit corporations spend their vast resources pursuing government policies that obsess over human-released carbon dioxide. The research grants for climate science, from various government departments like the Weather Service (NOAA) and NASA, go to reaching specific scientific conclusions desired by the politically influential. The desired outcomes may or may not resemble the search for truth—searching for that is not something to expect from institutions dedicated to making political rain.

The climate science well has long since been poisoned. The main purpose of its existence is to enforce ideology and quash dissent. It has been a successful campaign. No one dares ask questions about the orthodoxy who wants to have a career in the field. The last of the skeptics—even ones who are lukewarm—are retiring from the field. The dogmatists will ensure that the federal money rains on remarkably wasteful projects locking us into hopelessly inefficient technologies like wind and solar. The billions slated to be spent on these landscape and wildlife despoiling technologies will ensure that rent-seeking investors and companies are guaranteed profits by spending on them. They are too big to fail. Profits are once again privatized while losses go to society as a whole.

This is what I have come to expect from government programs: Brutal bullheadedness, wasteful spending, and the only human institution that truly fits the dictionary definition of a monopoly. Big Government is monopoly: it can banish any and all alternatives.

These were the thoughts that rose to mind when I recently learned that Roy Spencer and John Christy will be leaving the field of science they pioneered, and there are no apparent subsequent researchers interested in pursuing the scientific measurement of the earth’s temperature from space. This will result in an orphaned set of data based on specific measuring technologies.

Says Roy Spencer of himself and John Christy:

The main issue with me continuing employment past his retirement date is the lack of funding from the federal government. We had a Department of Energy contract, but it is ending and we have very few friends in Washington since we remain on the “wrong side” of the science. The peer review process (which determines what proposals the government will fund) has been stacked against us for many years making it almost impossible to get funded to investigate the issues we believe are important to the climate debate.

It’s a little ironic that even though both John and I are “lukewarmers” that’s just not alarmist enough for us to be allowed to play in the climate sandbox with the big dogs (sorry for the mixed metaphor).

Big Government, as President Eisenhower once pointed out, is for all intents and purposes not hospitable to the pursuit of truth through science. It is instead a tool to enforce dogma and narrow options for the benefit of the well connected.