I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously “unprovable” theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and “messy” as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
Or perhaps, general society is waking up to that fact that the self proclaimed High Priests of our society are not wearing any clothing…
Let’s face it. By scientific principles, science can not even prove anything exists. The best that can be proved by those principles is that thinking happens. Everything from that point forward has some aspect of faith to it.
So much mockery has been issued towards religion by said High Priests — after all, science has spoken and, therefore, faith must be wrong. Any attempt to prove faith must be discredited – because science has spoken.
Now, the truth comes out — it’s all a batch of stories and we all have to sort out what is true and what is simply the inventions of those who seek power, long for control and otherwise have some sort of axe to grind. That’s true from your average pulpit — and its true from your average lectern as well.
The High Priests all over our society are freaking out — because fundamentalism is dying under the weight of information access the net has given us and, with it, their power and their ability to control the hearts and minds of people.
Flatly: COOL!!!
