Science Is Not Fake News
No, science is not fake news. If its real science we are faced with. In the 70ies, there was very broad consensus among the scientific community that the world is cooling and that we face a new ice age within years because of the dust in the atmosphere. Virtually everything pointed in this direction. Naysayers were vilified. Turns out that the naysayers were right and the broad consensus could not have been more wrong. One problem is that especially when it comes to climate science, we are not presented with hard fact or hard data. We are presented with models that crunch selected data. And we are not told what alternative data would have been available or how the soup was cooked up. We are presented with an opinion. When someone measures the temperature at a time of day on a given location – thats a fact. When someone determines a daily average and without giving method and alternative data, he emits an opinion. But we are expected to take it all as fact. Its not fake news then – merely an opinion.
You think of yourself as a generally intelligent person, don’t you? Someone who’s good at deducing fact from fiction; someone who doesn’t get the wool pulled over their eyes very often. Someone who can reason their way out of a difficult situation, and can spot a con artist a mile away. Your intuition is great at discerning when someone’s twisting the rules to reach their desired conclusion, rather than the one that the evidence supports.
