The New Federal Reference Manual On Scientific Evidence: All The Smartest People Get Hoodwinked By The Climate Charlatans

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The New Federal Reference Manual On Scientific Evidence: All The Smartest People Get Hoodwinked By The Climate Charlatans

  • It is truly remarkable how easy it is to fool the smartest people. And especially when you tell them they are helping to save the world.

  • So something called the Federal Judicial Center has just come out with a new edition, the 4th, of something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The publication date appears to be December 31, 2025.

  • The idea that the federal government, and in particular the judiciary, needs a reference manual on scientific evidence seems to date from the 1990s. The courts, then as now, were facing an increasing volume of cases involving complex scientific evidence; and meanwhile almost none of the judges are trained in science. Best to provide them with a good grounding in the basics. Fortunately, back in the 60s Congress had established something called the Federal Judicial Center as a “research and education agency” of the judicial branch. Here was the perfect opportunity for that bureaucracy to expand their mission and budget.

  • In this latest version of the Reference Manual, the FJC has totally lost its way. Somehow, it got captured by a clique of climate charlatans who have inserted a lengthy section that is anti-science and based on logical fallacy. And many dozens of seemingly smart people who were supposedly reviewing this have gotten hoodwinked.

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Do We Really Know That Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cause Significant Climate Change?

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Do We Really Know That Human Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cause Significant Climate Change?

  • It’s by far the most important scientific question of our age: Do human emissions of CO2 and other such “greenhouse gases” cause significant global warming, aka “climate change”?

  • Based on the belief that an affirmative answer to that question is a universally accepted truth, our government has embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign to transform our economy by, among other things, eliminating hydrocarbon fuels from electricity generation (without any demonstrated workable plan for the replacement), outlawing the kinds of vehicles we currently drive, suppressing fossil fuel extraction, banning pipeline construction, making all your appliances work less well, and much more.

  • Express any doubt about the causal connection between human activities and climate change, and you could very well get labeled as a “climate denier,” fired from your academic job, demonetized by Google or Facebook, or even completely ostracized from polite society.

  • But is there actually any real proof of the proposition at issue? In fact, there is not.

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David Gelernter Takes On Darwinism

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David Gelernter is one of a small number of people in the world whom I would characterize as a genuine independent thinker. But then, I would say that, given that he’s one of the few conservatives on the faculty of Yale, where he is a professor of computer science. He has written widely, often outside his primary field, including on things like culture and art criticism. He was famously severely injured in 1993 by a bomb sent by the Unabomber. As an example of the extent to which he truly doesn’t care what his academic peers think of him, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 supporting Trump for President (or, perhaps more accurately, stating that the only way to protect the country from the disaster of Hillary was to vote for Trump).

In the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter steps on another super-high-voltage third rail — Darwinism. Moreover, he does it in the context of writing what is essentially a favorable review of a 2013 book titled “Darwin’s Doubt” by a guy named Stephen Meyer. Meyer is one of the leading promoters of the counter-theory to Darwinism called “intelligent design,” as can be seen in the subtitle of Meyer’s book: “The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.” I doubt that there is any more reviled guy in the field of origin of species than Meyer. (First line of Meyer’s Wikipedia bio: “Stephen C. Meyer (born 1958) is an American advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design.”) Nasty! So what has inspired Gelernter to take this one on? . . .

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