Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Really? Death Threats?

Science Vs Politics series.

Are we seriously accepting this? How is this ok that scientists, doing their job, investigating, asking questions, are receiving death threats?

Recently, climate scientists have been receiving death threats, obviously to intimidate them to cease their research, or stop them from producing scientific results on climate science. From any perspective, this is wrong. A death threat has no references and carries little scientific weight, a scientist can simply not respond to a death threat

Scientists (from the Latin word Scientia, meaning knowledge) deal with observable facts. We observe something, record it, repeat the observation and then try and predict what will happen, based on the previous observations, what we will see next. If we are wrong, and we often are, we change our prediction, then test again. It really is that simple.

So what are these people scared of? Why do they think it is necessary to offer death threats? What possible bad can come out of observing facts and making predictions? A death threat is really not the way to go about scientific criticism. Produce some facts, and research, then go to a scientist, and keep the emotive, irrational and inflammatory stuff out of it.

Can I make a prediction myself, and say that I bet these people making the death threats are not scientists. No scientist would go about making a criticism in this way. Can I also hypothesise that these people are not using the rational part of their brain when making these death threats. A rational human would probably realise that a threat to kill someone will probably not fix their problem. Further, I’ll guess that these people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. For a start there is no uncertainty that human induced climate change has and will continue to change our planet.

It's confusing to me why we accept scientific comments from non scientists that say stupid, irrational things.

Doing something about climate change based on our accepted scientific theories is really a no-brainer. If we are right, action now will probably save the lives of our grandchildren and ultimately life as we know it on this planet. There is seriously no doubt. 
If we are wrong, we have we lost nothing but our dependency on non renewable fuel and better energy efficiency? (that translates to cheaper!) Not really all that bad if you ask me!


Just saying.