Last week, a prestigious scientific journal came out with a peculiar article that made national news briefly and then vanished. It claimed that our habit of eating beef instead of chicken—or, better yet, beans and bugs—was responsible for warming the planet. The innovation in the study was to overlay beef eating with geography so that you could tell how much of this bad habit in your zip code was ruining the climate.
Journalists reporting on the study had advanced copies so that they could create user-friendly tools for readers. You could type in your own zip code to see how compliant your community is with the global effort to stabilize the climate. If you live in a big city, you are invited to be aghast at how the burger eaters next door are causing the polar ice caps to melt.
Yes, I know it may sound absurd. Keep in mind that this is where mainstream science is today. It’s going on all around us. You can read about it in the newspapers and hear about it on the radio.
For my own part, I took the time to read the study. What the authors did was overlay the United Nations’ most up-to-date climate model with the geography of studies about dietary habits. Then they ran a model speculating on how much our eating habits need to change in order to trigger an end to human-caused climate change.
The implications, of course, are that you should feel grave guilt for every steak or meatball you eat and forget all the talk you hear these days about how we need to eat more beef, not less. After all, the scientists say so.
After reading the study, I did a deep dive into the U.N. climate models and what might be wrong with them. After decades of debunking and qualification, not to mention failed predictions, it is still not easy to find the websites that raise doubts about these models. That’s because the people who have questions about climate models—there are thousands of ways to measure climate and zero cause-and-effect proofs of human-caused climate disruption tracing to fossil fuel and beef production—are still considered non-mainstream dissidents.
Suddenly, it occurred to me to link in my mind the reason these studies get published and why they generate attention. The money flows for this kind of writing and research, while it ends when you stand up and call it out. Whenever a researcher can come up with a clever way to express and present an established scientific orthodoxy, especially in an elegant way, it sees the light of day. Then promotions and more grants may be forthcoming.
They are publicized because they fit a political agenda.
All of which raises the question: Does anyone really, wholly and honestly, believe that these studies are true? This is not a question deemed admissible in this world of research and writing. The proof that it is worth doing is in the success of publication and the publicity it generates. The question of truth just doesn’t fit in here. It’s not what anyone is really trying to discover.
In the now-fashionable view, truth is a distraction. It blocks us from arriving at a consensus and prevents us from getting things done. This doctrine is preached in nearly all university environments and animates the entire academic industry. This is the corruption of science, resulting in studies that are so far-flung and preposterous that they defy belief. And yet we are invited to believe them.
This study on beef, for example, is inherently reductionist of complex phenomena to buckets of analysis that only work on a computer screen. Measuring the temperature of the Earth is not a fruitless task, but there are many ways to do so, and every innovation in technique has to be rebuilt backwards in ways that require multiple speculative leaps. When you pile your results on top of a presumption of cause and effect, along with measurements of dietary habits, you have built something like a Tower of Babel.
“To such a promoter, perception of truth is truth. If you can sell it, it must be true. If you can’t sell it, it must be false. Perception of truth is also malleable. If you can sell it, if you want to sell it, and you can’t sell it, that’s easy. You change it. You can change truth. You can claim false observations if necessary.”
He concluded with a strong statement about the biggest scientific hokum of our time:
“If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas. If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them. I have several I won’t have time to discuss, but I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”
That was and is an astonishing statement. You know how much attention it got? None. Not even the Nobel Prize in physics entitles a person to cut through propaganda once a settled orthodoxy has arrived.
Let’s mention another case from history: U.S. alcohol prohibition. It is usually believed that the crazy policy (1920–1933) was a result of religious fundamentalists in an inadvertent coalition with bootleggers. This story leaves out a crucial component: the scientists. That’s right, nearly the whole of the scientific establishment was all for the policy.
“A most effective measure in the prevention of crime, disease and human suffering is the prohibition law, rigidly enforced, by which alcohol is relegated to its proper place as a medicine, to be used only on the restricted prescription of physicians. Though not yet thoroughly enforced, we are beginning to hear of the marked diminution of crime, insanity and violence, hitherto due to the use of alcohol as a beverage. In a few years of strict enforcement of prohibition I look for a tremendous diminution of crime, sickness and death-rates.”
There you have it: The drinks of several millennia must be eradicated, thus repairing the whole of human nature. What could go wrong? Everything went wrong. The policy increased crime, sickness, and death from bathtub gin and gangland killings. The country attempted this for fully 12 years before government finally gave up. Now the entire episode is generally seen as folly.
Keep in mind that root: It was scientific folly. The belief was that the root cause of social dysfunction had been found, and therefore, it was up to the politicians to get rid of it and make the country a better, if not perfect place. Many people even at the time warned that this new policy could unleash something terrible, but they were ignored.
The problem of fake science has only gotten worse. It would be one thing if the only consequence were the perpetuation of error in print. The real-world results are more dangerous: the end of industrial civilization and the radical diminution of the health of the survivors. That is what we are dealing with here. It’s no small matter. Therefore, it is in everyone’s interest to shut down this industry of error and find a path toward elevating truth and reason as the only standards by which we separate fact from fiction.
