According to the AP, the DOE secretary picked his own climate science review team. Scientists said this is against the law.
Inaccuracies all over the place!
This is becoming commonplace in the trump regime. DOE is becoming like RFK's HHS.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/scientists-slam-inaccuracies-in-doe-climate-change-report/
2 comments:
I am not defending these decisions but I will point out that a lot of science got highly politicized in the last 10-20 years. Many people warned that this could undermine all of science in the future or leave it open for attack but no one listened to this or they in fact got attacked when they brought this up. Anyone in science knows that this was going on, yet they stayed silent because they do not want to get involved or they did not want to be canceled. I suspect that this will blow over in a few years but I hope science gets its act together and does not repeat the mistakes of the last 10 years. The same goes for universities.
This does matter to LLNL. One of the hand picked scientists by Wright is Steve Koonin. Koonin gave a talk at LLNL. I think Steve has some points on some things and is wrong about others. When he gave his talk Ben Santer threw a fit, attacked Koonin and said he would disassociate with LLNL if Koonin was allowed to give at talk. This was a horrible look for LLNL, Santer and climate science. He could have easily debated Koonin, given his own talk, or critique the talk by Koonin. The fact that he tried to have his talked canceled politicized the whole thing and undermined the scientific process. The defense of Santers actions by blog posters here and elsewhere just made the whole thing look even worse. Luckily, Koonin gave the talk, but many other speakers have been canceled around the nation.
Like I warned that this stuff was gonging to come back and cause issues with all of science, which as you can see is what is happening.
Climate science wrote it's own epitaph when it insisted on entering the public policy sphere and concluding that scientists should dictate public policy. Scientists don't dictate public policy, they only inform it, because policy is the art of evaluating subjective tradeoffs. For example, although global warning will mean significant changes, many detrimental, society may conclude that they are preferable to the cost of avoiding climate change. That decision isn't for science to make. If all public policy was solely determined by scientific consensus, we'd be living in a dystopian, socialist, police state world without free speech, government control of all industries, no patents or intellectual property rights, no borders or nations and no businesses or entrepreneurs aside from Elsevier and VWR. The Wright brothers never would have invented the plane and biologists would still be studying birds and building flapping machines to fly. Believe it or not, the world is more than peer reviewed science. Open a book or take a class in history to learn more.
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