Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a highly influential essay in the Philosophy of Science. As it has turned out, not always in a good way.
While Kuhn introduced such now-common terms as paradigm into the scientific lexicon, he also argued that science should be defined more by practice than principle. While defensible, this argument is not entirely reasonable; it ignores that no matter what scientists do, science is defined to a large degree by abstract principles such as falsifiability and universalism.
Worse, though, is what Kuhn’s successors have done with his ideas. A degraded version of Kuhn’s philosophy, expounded by semi-ignorant apparatchiks, is largely responsible for the contemporary conceit of “consensus science”: the debased notion that scientific truth is decided by committee, ideology trumps fact – and dissenters must be silenced.
On November 21, 2019, The Australian published an article on its opinion pages and online titled; ‘Let’s Not Pollute minds with Carbon Fears’ by Ian Plimer, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide and author of numerous books[…]
In the 1065 words published in The Australian, Plimer skewered climate alarmists with a machine-gun attack of facts, calling out “ignorant activists, populist scaremongers, vote-chasing politicians and green rent-seekers” for their deceptions and fraud.
The most explicit and extreme enunciation of “consensus science” was first expounded by climate scientist Stephen Schneider. Schneider’s hugely influential (the IPCC’s AR5 was dedicated to his memory) argument was that “post-normal science” must ignore the vast uncertainties in climate science and instead trade rigorous truth-seeking for policy influence. Schneider and his followers thus explicitly rejected Feynman’s dire warnings against “Cargo Cult Science” and embraced, instead, the ideology-driven model of (pseudo-)science which reached its previous nadir in the deadly travesty of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.
Like the Lysenkoists, climate apparatchiks are determined to silence debate and free inquiry, the hallmarks of science, not to say the Enlightenment, for half a millennium.
For theirs is a cult where groupthink rules and independent thinking and alternate views are thought-crimes, so Plimer must be silenced, not debated.
Leading the attack was the noted shill for climate alarmism, the taxpayer-funded ABC’s Media Watch, which despite being one of the most expensively produced programs per broadcast minute of airtime on Australian television, was unable to come up with a single fact to dispute any of Plimer’s words and could only resort to name-calling and rhetoric.
Media Watch’s attack on Plimer was proof of what I might humbly call “Brady’s Law”: always assume that a “fact-checker” is trying to bullshit you, until proven otherwise.
In adjudicating a complaint, the test for the APC is not if an opinion is right or wrong, the test if the opinion “is not based on significantly inaccurate material”. Therefore a strong and independent Press Council, one that values the cherished principles of free speech and open debate, should have quickly dismissed such complaints against Plimer’s opinion piece.
However, instead, it appears that the Press Council has decided it exists to rule on matters scientific[…]of Plimer’s 1065 published words, the APC could find fault with just two; the words; ‘fraudulent’ and ‘unsubstantiated’[…]the APC states:
The APC specifically took umbrage on behalf of the Bureau of Meteorology…except that Plimer never even mentioned the BOM.
The APC’s adjudication verbals Plimer and sets up a straw man argument ‘’concerning the Bureau of Meteorology’’. And then, the APC attacks this straw man argument, by spuriously defending the Bureau. This is curious conduct on behalf of the APC.
Quite the contrary: it’s the go-to tactic of so-called “fact-checkers”.
Any unbiased evaluation of Plimer’s published opinion that there has been ‘‘fraudulent changing of past weather records” would firstly look to determine if there is any evidence of ‘changing of past weather records’. And if so, based on the evidence, does Plimer have reasonable grounds for holding that opinion?
From the repeated alteration of Australia’s temperature records to eliminate the inconvenient heatwaves of the past century to the bombshell Climategate emails, it is an absolute fact that past weather records have been assiduously changed. It is a perfectly reasonable opinion, given what has been revealed of the methods and mindset of those involved, that these changes have been fraudulent.
And that should have been game, set and match to Plimer.
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