House of Eratosthenes

They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust. If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied. If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word slides off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and await the next.

It is timely because I was just commenting on a stuffy, committee-speak rebuttal-rebuttal from Western Washington University’s geology faculty, that appeared in the Bellingham Herald and then was forwarded to me by a certain older family member.

You know how these committee-speak rebuttal-rebuttals go by now. Boilerplate phrases everywhere. And just like vegetable oil, or an Obama speech, one half-gallon exactly the same as any other half-gallon:

We concur with the vast consensus of the science community that recent global warming is very real, human greenhouse-gas emissions are the primary cause, and their environmental and economic impacts on our society will likely be severe if we don’t make significant efforts to address the problem. Claims to the contrary fly in the face of an overwhelming body of rigorous scientific literature.

Vast and overwhelming! Flies in the face! Any statements of specifics are provided grudgingly, if they are provided at all. The economic impacts on our society will likely be severe? I wonder what the economic impacts are of being able to grow more plants and vegetables in an atmosphere that is warmer and has more CO₂. Looks like they ran out of ink before they could tell me…

Well, let me guess. Something to do with vastly and overwhelmingly settled science, or something. I should go get hold of the Fourth Assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and somewhere in there they’ll fill me in. Nobody can tell me exactly what page it’s on, because they haven’t had to go look it up, because everyone else already knew the answer and that’s why they’re going to tell me to go look it up.

Hello, sentence beginning furiously and then petering out into fatuity.

Without the benefit of Mencken’s quote, I replied with regard to the WWU litanies:

Reads more like prose than scientific commentary. Words like “overwhelming,” “vast” and “painstaking” are obviously unscientific, yet time after time I notice the written defenses of the global-warming con are consistently peppered with them. The authors seem to increase their use of these with each sentence, until they reach a summit of:

Science thrives on controversies; it rewards innovative, unexpected findings, but only when they are backed by rigorous, painstaking evidence and reasoning. Without such standards, science would be ineffective as a tool to improve our society.

That isn’t even true. When an Edison comes up with a new light source or an Eratosthenes figures out the size of the Earth, the best that the “standards” have managed to contribute to the advancement is to stay out of the way. Something they have very often failed to do.

There is an argument taking place here that is not being acknowledged: How does individual thinking benefit our society, and how does group-think benefit our society? Those who repeat the words of others that have been most-often repeated, seem to think it works like this: The individual comes up with any ol’ random idea, just like a random mutation occurring before evolution, but the individual lacks the vision or the ability to say, or to prove, that the idea is a good one. It’s just a fart in a hurricane until the committee sits down and subjects it to its many layers of vast, painstaking, overwhelming peer review; it is the committee’s place to say “you know what, you might have something there.” And then, thanks to the committee, we have a smart phone…

Those who inspect the details, see that the individual does a lot of work. That’s why everyone isn’t doing it! So before it leaves his desk, he already knows he has something and that it works. What he might not know, is that someone somewhere else may have a better way of doing it. He also can’t fund it. So it goes before the committee, which champions some innovations and kills off others. Like any committee, it doesn’t make its decisions for the benefit of mankind necessarily, but more out of political expediency. So it has the same chance of making the “right” decision as you or I have of calling heads-or-tails.

We all seem cleanly divided on which of those visions is the correct one. Those who are very opinionated and loud think it’s the first vision, those who’ve been through the process think it is the second vision. I guess we should do what the low-information-voters do, see who’s loudest and talks more, agree with them, and go back to watching “Jersey Shore” or whatever.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Political TheaterMonday, April 1st, 2013

Political Theater
Monday, April 1st, 2013