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Michael Shermer was once a regular in the pages of Scientific American, penning his Skeptic column every month from 2001 until 2018, when things began to turn sour. As James B. Meigs reports in the latest City Journal, the veteran journalist was fired for daring to question “truths” deeply cherished by the Left. As he discovered, modern journalists must never, ever report facts when they run counter to the narrative, a lesson Australia’s climate hacks took to heart long ago. Meigs writes:
…As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage.
Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data…
As to what Scientific America now regards as a red-hot story, read the guff behind the headline below:
Science is the search for truth, not for political popularity. Remember Hitler’s disparaging of ‘Jewish science’, ie Albert Einstein? It cost him the atomic bomb,- thank God.
We are governed by politicians who know nothing of science. They are mostly narcissists with a deep problem. There was only one exception to this generalisation,- Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford grad in chemistry. Hence her policy,”If you don’t know the answer, do more research until you do”.
To suggest that jews could have stayed in Germany and developed an A-bomb for Hitler is highly implausible to say the least. Even non-jews on that minor project, while keeping a straight face and spending a few million for appearances, made no serious attempt to assemble fissile U or Pu on a scale relevant to a critical mass. Heisenberg is widely credited with leading this charade brilliantly.
Perhaps we expect too much of our journalists. They have to rely on all the experts/activists who promulgate the junk science that has made the CC bogeyman into the Godzilla of our time. In his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), author Charles Mackay noted that: “every age has its peculiar folly, some scheme, project or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement or the mere force of imitation”. Our folly is to believe a political class and its bureaucrats can engineer a Goldilocks climate for everyone, everywhere and presumably forever;underwriting such a colossal delusion using our money because any sane investor will stay well away unless they do so.