The Death of Science

Years ago, I was remodeling my house and I hired a young man from church to help me on weekends.  He used the money to go on a short term mission trip with our church’s youth group.  Anyway, I was installing some piece of plumbing and needed a pipe cut.  I handed him the pipe and sent him to find the HACK saw and cut it.  When he had not returned in 30 minutes, I went looking.  He had found my fine ($150) woodworking saw and had been grinding at that pipe for 20 minutes – the only effect of which was to ruin the woodworking saw.  He then quickly learned the difference between a hack saw and a dovetailing saw.  Tools have a purpose and when used for that purpose they are marvelous things.  When used for purposes other than what they were designed for, the results can vary from expensive, to wrong, to evil.

That story crossed my mind when I read this story about “climate science” in The Free Press this morning.  Climate science is, you see, entirely based in statistics.  It was impossible before computers got powerful enough.  You cannot run experiments – too big, too expensive and to consequential.  As Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography, crediting Benjamin Disraeli, there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.”  The story proves that aphorism provided you can wade through the math.  The author best sums things up with these two, highly sarcastic  paragraphs:

Which brings me back to my own replication of WWA’s methodology. As I mentioned earlier, I can attribute any measure that increases or decreases over time with climate change. Major League home run totals have increased over the decades and thus correlate with increasing global temperature, so I applied the WWA procedure to the annual MLB home run totals and found that the record 6,776 home runs of 2019 would have been impossible in the climate of 1900. Don’t laugh—in 2023 the Associated Press covered a real attribution study (though not by WWA) claiming that climate change was increasing MLB home runs.

The method works in reverse as well. WWA published a 2022 study claiming that climate change added $4 billion of the damage from 2019’s Typhoon Hagibis in Japan. I repeated its calculation with one substitution: I used a time series of increasing global patent applications in place of global temperature. I found that “patent change” made the Hagibis rainfall about four times more likely, turning a once-in-28-year downpour into a once-in-seven-year event. I can see the headlines now: Until the world curbs its inventors, Japan faces a rising risk of floods.

They are manipulating the numbers people.  Which, combined with an aggressive media campaign, is driving the narrative on climate.  And so we end up with egregious public policy based on bad “science.”

When I first discovered that young man ruining my dovetailing saw I had to stop, take a deep breath and calm myself lest I unjustly yell at him for ignorance that I should have removed.  That initial burst of anger is precisely what I felt when I saw this story.  Science, you see, is a epistemological tool – means of gaining knowledge.  Sometimes it is useful and sometimes it is not.  The net result of that young man’s misguided efforts was money out of my pocket to replace the saw.  The misuse of the tools of science in this fashion are far more expensive.

Consider this:

One class cited in the report is a Harvard University environmental studies class called “Extreme Heat: White Nationalism in an Age of Climate Change.” The course description states it will study the relationship between “white militants” and “rightwing populism” and the environment.

I am guessing the prof is using the same statistical methodologies described above.  But then we are big into perverting things these days.  The next paragraph in that story about college course just linked, “Swarthmore offers “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology.” The class “examines feminist and queer writings about God, explores the tensions between feminist and queer theology, and seeks to stretch the limits of gendering-and sexing-the divine,” its description states.  “Theology” is from the Latin, “Theo” meaning “God” and “ology” meaning “study of.” Literally, theology is the study of God, not us, God.  How does feminism or homosexuality fit into that at all?  The tools of science and statistics are not the only tools being misused these days.

Like my old dovetailing saw, we are ruining science and, apparently, education generally.  Marvelous tools that have advanced mankind for centuries are being destroyed through misuse.  They will not be as easy to replace as a dovetailing saw.