Climate science has been defined as a beautiful experiment in disbursing $80bn of research funding on one strict condition:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
There are no right or wrong answers. Just remember to have fun.
Most creative response wins a prize.
The glorious march of climate science is proof of what our top intellectuals can achieve when freed from the continual, stifling pressure to add to human knowledge, to “discover” things, to be “right” about stuff.
Nobody expects semioticians or gender theorists to produce knowledge, or even exhibit any. We value them too much for that. When we employ such thinkers we know it would be both unreasonable and oppressive—and in a very real sense, rape—to demand any epistemic bang for our buck.
But until recently scientists could only dream of the same workplace rights their humanities counterparts take for granted.
Until recently a shameful double standard has prevailed. For far too long we’ve treated half our intellectual workforce little better than slaves—toiling in a Satanic, Dickensian knowledge-mine—when their only crime was to be born on the wrong side of the Sokal divide.
With climate science, that’s changed.
If only Einstein had the slightest idea how literally his epistemological adage would one day be taken! He might’ve died happy, secure in the consolation that his ideas mattered after all.
CLIMATE NUREMBERG 
A friend told me about a book with the notion that if everybody beleives in an historical fact and no records exists that say otherwise then this historical event has happened and *is* the truth! And this philosopher wrote that a long time ago – in 1984 BC!
Astrology was true back then because everybody knew it was true. Competing theories has impaired it today and replaced it with something that is impossible to understand.
Are we really happier now with that disposal of a good working knowledge given to us from our ancestors? I think not.
Astrology was a fully accepted science back then, as valid a science that CAGW itself is today. Facts cut in stone was what it was.
We must defend our knowledge from competing facts and never let their wave-functions collapse by human observations! And if it is too late, then let us remind ourselves that it can be contained and that an observation disappears with its observer.
LikeLike
We must defend our knowledge from competing facts and never let their wave-functions collapse by human observations!
Erm, I don’t follow. How do observations enter into it? As Naomi Oreskes, the world’s only historian of science consensus, put it: “What counts as knowledge is the ideas accepted by the fellowship of experts.”
LikeLike
All too often the reality of imagined weather and climate forecasts are dismissed out of hand. The UN, with some assistance from Guardian environment correspondents, is at last getting right.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/01/un-weather-forecasts-2050-climate-change-floods-drought
If this doesn’t motivate those who deny imaginary Climate Change science, then I don’t know what will. It’s time to act!
LikeLike