By Jo Nova
The Blob sets “The Science Trap” — and conservative politicians get caught every time
The Bureaucratic Blob Team brag about following “The Science” but the truth is, they fund only the questions they want answered, they sack the scientists who disagree, then they call everyone names who thinks differently. They’re not open to debate or ideas, they rule through ostracism and cancel culture — demanding people believe “The Science” — and mocking them as simpletons if they don’t — it’s like a cult or perhaps a kindergarten.
Conservative politicians leave themselves defenseless because for decades they keep funding the same Blob Science Institutions with the same Blob-incentives. When research groups are paid to find a crisis, they’ll keep hunting til they find one.
Last week in the debate, the Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton said the dreaded line: “I’m not a scientist” and then had to say the next day “I believe in climate change” just to quell the uproar. It was the classic mindless science trap. It’s a hundred agencies paid to speak jargon versus one politician with no tech support.
Imagine if he had said the Coalition is going to fund the science research the Labor Party won’t?
None of our climate models can tell us whether next summer will be a BBQ scorcher or a wet blanket. The models are failing because they are missing nearly everything about The Sun. They treat our nearest star like it is a light globe, ignoring the solar magnetic field which is bigger than the solar system, the electric field, the sun spot cycles, and the way sun’s output of UV light changes. Our current best climate models all assume these effects are zero. They assume the solar wind which batters Earth at a million miles an hour has no effect at all. Isn’t it time we set up a dedicated agency to find out what role the sun has?
Don’t we owe it to the koalas, the children (and the taxpayer?)
We know some factor on the Sun affects ground water recharge rates, streamflow in rivers, jet streams, lightning in Japan and even jelly fish plagues. In the 1800s we knew solar cycles affected the price of wheat. Two hundred years later we still don’t know why there are so many links between the solar cycles and our climate. When the sun is quiet, there are more floods in central Europe, the prevailing winds shift in Chile, and winters are warmer in Greenland. Something is going on. All the warming we’ve seen since the Little Ice Age could be entirely due to the increase in solar activity.
What if the Sun is causing the warming and we’re spending hundreds of billions trying to reduce CO2 and it’s irrelevant?
Who did that due diligence before we spent half a trillion dollars trying to change the weather? Hands up? Anyone?
Why aren’t we investigating The Sun’s role in Climate Change? (Because we’re afraid it’s real?)
Big-Government politicians strangle science. They pour money in to find out “how bad man-made climate change is” but virtually nothing goes into asking how “good” our emission are, nor whether the Sun has the commanding role, and we’re irrelevant. Where is the institution dedicated to finding out how the Sun drives our climate? There isn’t one. There are a few researchers who trip over parts of the puzzle, but there is no independent dedicated agency that exists in order to find reasons that the Sun controls our weather.
Australia needs a dedicated Australian Space-Weather-Climate Institute to investigate the effect of the solar magnetic field, cosmic rays and the changes in solar UV on our climate. It needs to be separate from the other conglomerate behemoths of science, or it just becomes another part of The Blob.
We need competition in science, and a free market, not these centralized Soviet conglomerates of science like the CSIRO. Once an agency is trapped inside a big organisation, it can’t say something which makes the rest of the organization look silly. Nor could it publish results that showed the rest of the conglomerate group’s work was pointless. Likewise, Australia has an Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre (ASWFC) but it’s a part of the Bureau of Meteorology. It won’t be competing with the BoM, or pointing out their flaws on the Channel Nine news.
Australia has RMIT SPACE Research Centre, and the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Space Physics, they are looking at space weather effects on satellites, technology, and advancing the space industry. The CSIRO Climate Science Centre should be looking at the role of the sun, but the CSIRO is 100% Blob. It has bet its “expert” reputation on CO2, lock, stock and barrel.
We need a free market in science — we need that competition
The incentives for science are screwed. Right now scientists serve Big Government and work to get Bigger Government elected. They don’t serve the people.
In a better world the government would fund both science teams and they’d be criticizing each other in televised debates. The media would ask scientists hard actual questions and embarrass them when they were inconsistent hypocrites, or just chronically wrong. The voters could have informed consent…
In an even better world, the voters could vote for their tax dollars to go to particular areas of interest (like say when they fill out their tax return?). That way the scientists would want to serve the public, they’d want to be useful, and they’d be competing with other scientists so they’d speak out when they thought a climate model was useless.
In my favourite world, we’d pay hardly any tax, so we could all afford to donate to the research we liked the most…
Naturally, anything funded by the Government sooner or later becomes part of the Blob. That’s why we have to get the incentives right.
That and Eternal Vigilance.
Photo: CME on the Sun August 31, 2012.
