Disenchanted ex-richarddawkins.netter Dominic Saltarelli draws our attention to a group of cosmologists who would appear to agree with my position on the need for science reform:
The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory….
n open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt”, in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.
This letter was published four years ago, so I’m curious whether both Bad Astronomy and the signers of the letter are correct and that dark matter and dark energy have been observed in the intervening time, whether the signers are incorrect and they had been observed previously, or whether Bad Astronomy was incorrect and it has not been observed. I should appreciate it if anyone with the appropriate credentials would deign to explain this seeming dichotomy.
It’s interesting, too, to see that so many self-identified skeptics so readily abandon all skepticism whenever the magic word “science” is mentioned. The ironic reality is that doubt is usually honored by Christians, but it cannot be tolerated by scientists.
On a related note, the latest scientific charade is beginning to fall apart. Scientists and science fetishists may hate it that a part-time rebel scientist such as myself should so confidently express contempt for the current consensus, but you don’t need impressive scientific credentials or even to make use the scientific method to recognize when a group of people are attempting to BS everyone else, you simply need to keep your eyes open and possess sufficient experience with human nature.
After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.
This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced Nasa’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.
As I have said from the very start, Global Warming is nothing more than another science fraud designed to foster greater central government power. It’s not the first, it won’t be the last. The first clue should have been that the greatest champion was a politician turned propagandist. I’m just surprised that it’s taken the real scientists so long to unmask the charlatans. Note that even as its scientific justification fails, the Fourth Reich is taking a page from both the warmingmongers and the New Atheists in trying to blame nonexistent Global Warming for imaginary wars.