Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Pajamas media has found an excellent quote from Richard Feynman, which skewers every global warmer:

“The Pleasure of Finding things out” by Richard Feynman, page 187

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science-like the South Sea Islanders making airfields, radio towers out of wood, expecting a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely, they don’t fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are-experts. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it-how did the scientists find out-how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. . I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.

Genuine science is replicable. And “replicable” does not mean two priests recite the same doctrine, it means they explain what they did in such a fashion that anyone else could do it also.

If they refuse to explain, they are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Unsupported and unexplained politically correct pseudo science appears all the time in “Science” and “Nature”
For example:

Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.

This sort of thing (that PC science is in practice exempted from data disclosure, and proudly proclaims results on the basis of secret evidence) has been an ongoing scientific scandal from the very beginning of the global warming movement, and everyone aware of this unscientific practice should have realized that global warming science is not science, but politics and religion, and that global warming scientists are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Environmentalism, and several other isms, are state sponsored religions, which because of state backing have the privilege of publishing their holy texts in scientific journals despite conspicuous and infamous failure to comply with the standards and rules of those journals.

Nine years later, Briffa’s Yamal data for twentieth century temperatures turned out to be that one tree of ten selected trees grew unusually rapidly during the twentieth century as compared to fossil trees of the same type from the same area. These ten trees were selected by Bricca after a great many other trees in the same area were measured, but the rest of the measurements were not included.

The larger population of trees, taken as a whole, shows much the same growth pattern as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from those ten, Yamal06, and most of the evidence for climate change vanishes. Restore the much larger set of tree measurements from which the ten trees were selected, and all of the evidence for climate change vanishes – the population as a whole is has the same growth rates as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from half a dozen graphs of global warming in near a dozen papers, and suddenly they do not show global warming any more.

Bricca has, at this time, not yet explained why those ten trees, and not other trees in the same area measured in the same survey. And whatever his explanation, ten trees is not enough.

The government likes data that supports more government power, rewards those that tell it what it wants to hear, and punishes those that tell it what it does not want to hear.

Environmentalism is a state sponsored religion, for it is perfectly visible to anyone that wants to look that it is not subject to the same standards as normal science, the story of Briffa and the Yamal data being one example of a great many.

People have lost their jobs for reporting that glaciers are advancing in a particular area, even though they fully agreed that most glaciers are retreating. This makes it hard to tell whether most glaciers are indeed retreating.

Environmentalism generally, and the Global Warming movement in particular, acts like a holy and sectarian religious movement, a religious movement backed by state power, not like science.

Recent events prove that on certain topics, they do not carry science, but are mere megaphones for the holy ranting of the priesthood.

Science is not that which the state decrees to be science. It is that which follows the rules of science, which unwritten rules correspond, more or less, to the written rules of the older and more prestigious journals.

If these journals are reluctant to apply these written rules on certain sensitive topics, then what appears on those sensitive topics will not be science, and hence what appears or fails to appear in such journals is not an indication of truth, but of religion.

In particular if the replacement hockey stick had been genuinely peer reviewed, then, in accordance with the unwritten rules of science, and the written rules of the older and more prestigious science journals, the data and calculations supporting the graph would have been made available. Had the data and graphs been made available, people would have objected nine years ago that ten trees are not enough.

Since not genuinely peer reviewed, since not in conformity with journal rules, therefore not genuine science, therefore mere theology.

3 Responses to “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

  1. Ed Darrell says:

    Funny. You cite Feynman calling for teachers to look at the studies, the research, the actual experiments, but you cite the High Priests of Antiwarming, who claim scientists are wrong — in fact, among a group of a dozen Antiwarmists, you’ll get unanimous agreement that the scientists are wrong.

    You’ve performed a grand act of Cargo Cult Science here. Feynman’s ghost is laughing.

    • jim says:

      If you believe in the “scientists” who claim to have evidence of anthropogenic global warming, you believe in evidence that they have refused to reveal, usually refused to reveal in defiance of the freedom of information act and the rules of the journals in which they publish. The evidence that has been extracted from them, does not not support anthropogenic global warming.

    • Mike Mellor says:

      Ed Darrell, if you would only read the article you would find that your delusional argument has already been countered.

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