The whole piece is worth perusal. This jumped out at me.
Embracing uncertainty, knowing that you do not know, and that what you think you do know may be wrong—this is foundational to a scientific approach to the world. Over the last decade, and especially since Covid, we have seen an increasing focus on certainty, and on single static solutions to complex problems. Perhaps most alarming of all, those appeals to authority, and to silencing those who disagree, has arrived under the banner of science. #FollowTheScience, we are told, when that has never been how science worked. I hope, still, that the educational philosophy that I laid out here, as a young scientist who was yet to discover most of the joys of teaching, can once again rise up in institutions of higher education throughout the land.
I share the skepticism of the propagandist who march to war against truth under a banner of #FollowTheScience. Their interest in Truth or in Science is de minimis. They are primarily interested in what the claim of Truth or the brand of Science can yield to them in terms of power and control.
This has been the stance of NPR since at least 2020. Stand With the Facts! they advertise. A More Informed Public they claim. All nonsense and propaganda.
One of the first rules you learn in the study of Climate is that Climate is not Weather. Mixing the two is a bog standard category error. Today's weather tells you little about next decade's climate. Today's climate tells you little about next decade's weather.
Even reliably woke Scientific American acknowledges the truth, Don't Be Fooled: Weather Is Not Climate by Kate Marvel. This is mind numbingly easy to understand by both logic, reason and empiricism.
As Marshall Shepherd brilliantly puts it,“weather is your mood, climate is your personality." Weatheris short-term and impossible to predict far in advance. I have no idea what the weather will be like in New York City on January 20, 2021. But I’m fairly confident it will be chilly, because New York winters are cold. Climate is just the average weather over a long time. A freakishly warm January day doesn’t make New York a winter vacation paradise. And a cold day, month, or even year doesn’t mean the climate’s not heating up.
Yet NPR, our federal government financially supported news organ cannot ever report on any weather event anywhere without explicitly linking that event to long term climate change. Rain in the summer in Vermont? Climate Change! A string of hot muggy days in Georgia in the summer? Climate Change! Some mudslides in California? Climate Change! An erupting volcano in Iceland? Climate Change! Forest fires in Canada? Climate Change!
They are driveling idiots who ought to be embarrassed by such crass category errors yet their propaganda is "Stand with the Facts." They clearly cannot understand facts even were they to be struck in the head with them. They seem to think that if, like some medieval monks mindlessly chanting a Latin text they do not understand, they repeat the magic words Climate Change enough, they will take on some real world meaning.
Double click to enlarge.
But it remains the Truth that Weather is not Climate. No matter what the nattering nabobs of nonsense at NPR might mindlessly mutter. And Science is a dynamic process of discovery undertaken by those with the courage of curiosity. It is not a static dead pond of Gradgrind facts to be dredged up for meaningless propaganda and debate point-scoring.
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