Could've saved myself the trouble...

...of all those recent global warming posts, if I'd known about this Michael Crichton speech a few weeks ago.

Crichton puts his finger on exactly what makes me nuts about the who-cares-if-it's-literally-true-or-not-because-we-ought-to-be-doing-this-stuff-anyway line of thought: once you say that the ends justifies the means, then science can be subverted to whatever political ends one deems necessary. Plus, the global warming stuff is such blatantly obvious bullshit; it's a downright insult to the intelligence. Here's Crichton making a point that every American high school graduate ought to know -- because every American high school graduate ought to know the difference between real science and Carl Sagan / Paul Erlich / Time magazine pseudoscience consensus bullshit:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period....

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Thank you! That's exactly my point. The majority of scientists usually get it wrong just like the majority of people usually get it wrong -- because most people, including most scientists, are intellectually dishonest, self-deceiving jackasses. If you want to know whether to trust a "scientist," you don't look at his degrees or at his grant money or at his influence in the media or at his political connections at the United Nations. You look at his methodology. Does he prove his point, or just he does market his product?

That's not the only point Crichton makes in his generally excellent speech. Read it all.

Again, I just have to re-emphasize the point from Crichton's speech that I already quoted: consensus is politics. Science is reproducible results. (I used to enjoy a hilarious journal in which scientists who wanted to be silly and have a little fun used to publish parody scientific papers. Its name? The Journal of Irreproducible Results, at which you may find, among other things, this 1974 parody of Armageddon Pseuodscience, in which, if you take out all references to National Geographic and replace them with "global climate change," you get something that is instantly familiar: Al Gore wouldn't realize it was supposed to be a joke.)

Pseudoscientists build consensus because they can't produce reproducible results. And if you let pseudoscientists drive your public policy...well, then, not to be callous and all, but frankly you deserve what you get.

HT: Ace