Letters to the Editor
Margalis
Published Letters: 614 Editor's Choice: 16
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You aren't getting it
[Read the article: Men who hate women on the Web]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Chris Rock is a comedian.
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As far as New Age, politics and science goes you are conflating about 4 separate issues.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is a problem and it is at least partially man-made. The scientists that believe that are not new age types, they aren't granola-eating liberals or crazy folk. Virtually every scientist with relevant knowledge agrees. Their work appears in peer-reviewed journals based on extensive data, studies and scholarship.
It is the Bush administration that makes science political, forcing the EPA to gut passages from its own studies. Forcing scientists to put out reports they know to be false, misleading and incomplete, because that better suits the politics of Bush.
You make it sounds as if a bunch of crazed leftists decided to get together and pretend that global warming is a huge problem. The fact is educated people in their field, regardless of political stripe, agree that it is a problem based on actual research.
Left wing people make this part of a broader agenda, and right wing people oppose it, and in that way it is political, but the original study is not politicized any more than carbon dating is political because it contradicts the Bible. Science isn't always going to agree with your personal politics. If conservatives decide not to believe in irrational numbers any more that doesn't make mathematicians leftists, it makes them mathematicians instead of politicians. The notion that the Earth was not the center of the universe was likewise not a political notion, it was a scientific one. Nor was the notion that smoking is linked to lung cancer, which was turned into something very political as well. Science doesn't cater to your politics.
Global warming science does not fall under the same umbrella as new age medicine! Yeah, "The Secret" sucks. What that has to do with science I have no idea. The truth is that very few scientists are New Age types. You are taking entirely distinct groups of people and lumping them together so you can write them off as one entity. Global warming science is not "New Age", it is the scientific process in action. Scientists are not a big consumer of The Secret or Homeopathic remedies.
You are taking distinct concepts and combining them into an elaborate Frankenstein's Monster straw man so you can argue guilt by association.
If you want to argue against the validity of global warming you have to do research, cite flaws in existing research, propose alternate rational hypotheses, etc. The involved a great deal of scholarship and effort, not simple hand-waving. If you have a problem with a climate model, state precisely what that problem is. Citing a vague argument by a fiction writer does not cut it.
The way to combat science you don't agree with is with better science. Not with some hed-herring about New Age religion.
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I would point out
[Read the article: Men who hate women on the Web]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that New Age concepts are typically considered in opposition of traditional Western science. You will find New Age medicine critiqued in things like the New England Journal of Medicine. (And in fact "junk science" is oftend used to describe new age concepts by science types)
It is true that some liberals believe in both the efficacy of homeopathic remedies and in global warming, but that says little about global warming science, other than that it appeals to people who are also likely to value the sanctity of nature and all that jazz. Those are laypersons, not the people actually performing global warming research.
Again, science that showed that the earth was not the center of the universe appealed strongly to religious critics, but that doesn't mean the science itself was anti-religious - it was just good science. What political orientation embraces the science is not relevant and not a commentary on the validity of the science itself.
The people who argue against global warming are typically not scientists, and not armed with scientific data or theories that can withstand real scrutiny. That should tell you something.
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Deepak Chopra
[Read the article: Men who hate women on the Web]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is not a scientist.
You don't need to convince me that much of new age stuff is junk science. I agree. The problem is you can't distinguish between junk science and real science. In your mind they are all the same.
Are you sure? Many scientists are wackos. That's why they need peer review.
This is laughably wrong. Peer review does not exist because scientists are "wackos", peer review is part of the foundation of the scientific process. Following up on claims, independently reproducing results, checking for correctness. Peer review exists because everyone is fallible and science attempts to minimize that fallibility.
You appear to know very little about science or the scientific process other than what you have read in a few blogs. You appear to be absolutely fixated on new age stuff, though you can't distinguish new age junk science from real scholarship. The fact that you don't understand why peer review is important and a hallmark of good scholarship is frightening.
You are behaving just as irrationally as the new age people you are attacking. Your opinion may be different but you display the same faulty logic and lack of reasoning.
That's the end of what I have to say on this subject. I don't have the patience for any more.