Monday, February 28, 2011

There's No Denying, State and Science Don't Mix

In "Fact-Free Science," Judith Warner of the New York Times praises President Obama’s request for budgetary increases for scientific research, particularly of “alternative energy,” but she then goes on to decry the so-called “politicization of science” of those pesky global warming “deniers.”

But what is government financing of scientific research if not the marriage of science and state, that is, the politicization of science? Government dollars are political dollars, and their injection into science, ultimately, is the injection of those whose political ideology rules the day. This is the corruption of science.

There’s much more not to like about this Time’s piece, particularly in that Warner tries to paint so-called global warming “deniers” (who are akin to Holocaust deniers) as taking a page from leftists of decades past, who explicitly denied reality’s existence as a way to undercut the very idea of scientific truth. But the reality Warner denies is that leftists still do this, that is, their global warming/climate change scaremongering entirely rest on those corrupt underlying premises that deny reality and thus (scientific) truths.

For now, let’s just stick to the idea that there should and must be a wall of separation between science and state. To deny that truth is to invite the corruption that makes up the state of climate science.