The failure of scientody

The profession is demonstrating its corruption through its refusal to make use of the method:

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation – do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.

One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.

While I have tremendous regard for the effectiveness of the scientific method, I have very, very little respect for scientists. They are very, very far from the impartial devotees of scientody that they so love to portray themselves being. With a few notable exceptions, they are cowardly, contemptible herd animals more interested in jousting for a better position among the herd hierarchy than advancing the state of human knowledge.

There have never been more scientists accomplishing less of scientific value than at any point in the scientific era. As for global warming, scientists of the future will look back on it in much the same way scientists today view phrenology, even as they attempt to push their latest non-scientific nonsense on the rest of us.