Lord Monckton On "Climate Change," (and "Legalism" Vs. "Confucianism")
This is an excellent post. I think that science is an amazing thing, and try to take a scientific world-view. It depresses me a bit to have arrived at the conclusion that science has been corrupted by government hand-outs, but this is what the rare pieces of unbiased data tells me is occurring. To get unbiased data is very difficult. One must go "into the field" to get it.
I have gone "into the field," and seen how actual scientists who have massive amounts of data have been silenced, or are afraid to speak out. (I've been on hundreds of college campuses, and talked to many climate researchers.) One side of the debate can (AND DOES!) interfere with the grant money they are currently using to feed themselves and their families! So, it's smarter for them to "keep their heads down." Moreover: their data doesn't disprove global warming! Their data merely indicates it's "not as great of a problem as it's being made out to be" and that "there's room for doubt."
Because they don't take a directly-opposing position, their "cybernetic system" is at a distinct disadvantage to the zealously-self-confident "global warming alarmists" who have the full funding and backing of government. Moreover: If one opposes global warming, one does not merely gain the enmity of the "scientific" community. One gets smeared by 1/2 of the political spectrum as being some kind of Fox-News-watching mindless religious zombie.
So think about what pressure the former illegitimate attacks would put a scientist under:
If the scientist is a religious man, who is in the dating pool, he would then limit his sexual options to "conservative" or "libertarian" women (because the liberal women he's near would be "opposed" to his core beliefs, if they've been brainwashed by the cult of global warming). He may culturally be a liberal, so this may be off-putting to him.
If the scientist is a religious man (or woman), who is not in the dating pool, and he publishes criticisms of global warming, then the left can instantly attack him for his religious view (even if his science is sound, and even if religious global warming believers are not similarly attacked). He's easy to pigeonhole. This holds true for a woman as well.
If the scientist is non-religious and does excellent work that contradicts global warming, his funding will still "dry up." ...Because the politicians want "scientific work" that demands a government intervention. Also, the scientist will be lambasted as an unscientific rube, and a "climate change denier" (even if he's not a denier, but a "doubter" ..which, by the way, is the right position for those who oppose the coercive cult of global warming correction to take.)
Even in #3 above, the mildest of the "currently predictable punishments for opposing orthodoxy," the picture is grim for anyone who approaches the subject scientifically.
...so they don't.
Scientists are subject to the same social and political pressures that the rest of us are. They have the same level of integrity most people have (approximately equal to that of a burning scrap of tissue paper).
So it's no wonder they fold to threats from the political regime that prints the money, and sends a disproportionate share to the Cult of Global Warming.
Cults aren't scientific.
In fact, the most damning evidence against the global warming "correctors" is their focus on similar "mathematically unlikely to change things" "solutions."
Ray Kurzweil (and many others) point out that a technology must be "market-viable" before it's implemented. Solar cells were not at a high-enough level of efficiency when Kurzweil predicted they'd supplant fossil fuels, but predicted they'd be high enough in a few years, due to a type of Moore's law of increasing miniaturization of cell components.
Whether or not the government did ANYTHING, the prior changes were going to occur, and solar power was going to become "increasingly-more-competitive" over time.
So, the government having poured TRILLION$ into environmentalism(including "carbon trading credits" that have made globalist socialists like Maurice Strong into multi-billionaires) hasn't changed a natural market progression toward INDIVIDUALIZED ENERGY PRODUCTION that is a market good, whether global climate change exists or not. All the excess money spent on this has been wasted by government.
Government spending is a grossly-inefficient way of allocating resources. This is because it is inherently coercive, so there is inherent opposition to it, and that opposition is inherently more efficient, and thus, inherently more rational (by default --there may be exacerbating factors, but "all things being equal" this is true).
It may be that, with no near competitors, the smartest use of science dollars is to finance the building of synthetic brains in humanoid robot bodies. Susan Gildert of kindred.ai makes an incredibly good argument for this. Demis Hassabis (of "DeepMind") argues something very similar, minus the robot bodies. He says "Solve intelligence and then use that intelligence to solve everything else." The prior pathway is also supported by the reason, logic, and data collected in Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near," and many other books. If there was a free market in scientific research (with no government grant dollars at all), we'd be able to measure the voluntary feedback of the aggregate of millions of voluntary choices in the domain of science. Instead of financing global warming research, we'd likely see more engineers "solving intelligence."
Instead, the domain of science has been sullied with the stupid priorities of power-seeking politicians.
Just like society overall has been sullied with their prison industrial complex, and their AVOIDABLE foreign wars of aggression.
Which brings me to my final point: Those who want power over their fellow man are least-capable of using that power in a benevolent way. In fact, using sought-after political power in a benevolent way is something that is highly-unlikely, even given the best of intentions, because intentions don't equate to knowledge. Moreover: those who know how dangerous government power is often don't want government power, leaving only those who either (1) don't know how dangerous it is or (2) those who want to use it for their own malevolent and selfish purposes, to seek it.
The idea of the people who created prisons full of victimless-non-criminals being in charge of basic research should chill the blood of all Americans.
Instead, those Americans bleat like sheep, condemning those who dare think for themselves in the domain of "climate change." And who will calm that frenzied bleating? Only the loving hand of big brother, carring a wad of unearned cash for any scientist who is willing to sell out their own reason and logic to coercion and conformity.