Climate Change Apocalypse: "Permanently Immunized From Falsification"

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Climate Change Apocalypse: "Permanently Immunized From Falsification"

  • In last Saturday’s post, I provided a quote from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy that encapsulated the gist of the scientific method: “[T]heories that are permanently immunized from falsification . . . can no longer be classified as scientific.”

  • That seems simple enough. Surely we ought to be able to keep track of that one basic precept to distinguish the science from the non-science.

  • In practice, it turns out to be not so simple at all. To illustrate, let’s consider the latest from the climate apocalypse movement.

  • For today I’ll put aside the grand foretellings of planet-wide climate doom, and focus instead on just one little question: whether the current wave of wildfires in the West has been caused by human-induced global warming, in turn resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

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Do Democrats Really Care About Meaningful Police Reform?

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  • After George Floyd died in the hands of police in Minneapolis at the end of May, and with the ensuing wave of protests and riots calling for an end to police brutality, you might think that enacting policing reforms would be the number one priority of Democrats both in Congress and in state and local jurisdictions they control.

  • But if you look at the evidence, a better inference would be that Democrats are trying to use these issues towards their own partisan gain, with no real effort to get most substantive reforms enacted any time soon, if ever.

  • I have many disagreements with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, but one thing we can agree on is that policing in America needs reform.

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Scientific American Goes Full Anti-Science

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  • Back at the beginning of the Trump administration in January 2017, it was all the rage for media on the left to accuse Trump and his people of being “anti-science.” I compiled a collection of such accusations in a post on January 27 of that year, using the title “Who Again Is ‘Anti-Science’?”

  • Among those I cited as making the accusation was the venerable magazine Scientific American, which had published a piece on January 18, 2017 with the title “Trump’s 5 Most Anti-Science Moves.”

  • If you look at that 2017 Scientific American piece, or the other articles that I cited in my post, you will see that those commenters are conceiving of “science” not as a special methodology, but rather as something more like: “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” The basic complaint of the commenters was that Trump was “anti-science” because he was listening to or appointing people who disagreed with — or worse, sought to de-fund — functionaries in the government who called themselves scientists.

  • I have a different definition of the term “science.” . . .

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The Biden Energy Plan Is A Joke

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  • In any rational world, a candidate proposing the energy plan that Joe Biden has proposed for the United States would be laughed out of the race for President on that ground alone.

  • The word “unserious” does not remotely begin to describe the situation.

  • In essence Biden says he will cause a complete transformation of the U.S. energy economy within 30 years — or maybe it’s 15 — with no idea what technology might be able to accomplish that, how much it might cost, or how much poorer the effort might make the American people. We have moved from the real world into the realm of fantasy and gaslighting.

  • And yet, at least as of today, Biden continues to lead in most polls. . . .

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Can We Avoid Another Massive Round Of "Stimulus"?

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  • It was on March 27 this year that the so-called “CARES” Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) became law — a $2.2 trillion federal spending bill, designed to bail absolutely everyone out of any and all downside risk from the economic downturn brought about by government response to the pandemic.

  • There was virtually no opposition, with the bill passing unanimously in the Senate and by voice vote in the House. Since there was no new tax revenue associated with the bill, it represented approximately a 10% instant increase in the public debt incurred in the 231 years since the founding of the Republic.

  • Whew! Was there any possible negative consequence to taking on this enormous amount of new debt, mostly just to hand out checks to anybody and everybody, whether they needed the money or not? If so, that subject was barely discussed anywhere.

  • Hey, this was a “stimulus.” Everybody knows that when the economy is down, it needs a massive federal “stimulus” to get it going again.

  • Then, almost immediately after the CARES Act became law, the House started working on the next round of so-called “stimulus,” labelling the new effort with the equally idiotic acronym of the “HEROES” Act. . . .

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