The two issues are apparently unrelated:
- There is no scientific evidence linking the warming in the 2oth century to CO2 and there is clear evidence from long term records that show that such changes occur quite naturally.
- There is no historical evidence that anyone in Britain was ever called a celt, ever knew themselves as a celt; in contrast, the Roman texts make it very clear that the Britons considered themselves to be distinct from the Gauls and Romans and that the Celts were a subgroup of the Gauls.
However, despite the overwhelming evidence in both cases, there persists a false belief amongst academia that the “politically correct” idea is unequivocally true. In both areas, but for very different reasons, I started with a naive belief in the status quo, then found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the facts with what I was told, and then as any sceptic would do, I went to check the raw facts myself to try to determine what a reasonable assessment of the facts would suggest and in both cases I have found that far from being a very nuanced debate, it turns out that the evidence is overwhelmingly against what has become the “political correct” myth within academia.
What is the problem?
Let me first explain the issue with science in academia. The problem academics have with real sceptic science, is that science doesn’t work by consensus, it is not some democracy where we all vote for which theory we want to work, nor is it some beauty contest where we decide which theory is most attractive.
Instead, using the political analogy, science is a dictatorship of the facts. There is no compromise, if the facts say something is true, then no number of people wanting something else to be true can make it true. And often the truth science reveals is uncompromising even brutal and often not at all Politically Correct.
So, if the facts say that some racial group have a lower IQ or another are more athletic, or that Homosexual activity increases the risk of Aids, then irrespective of whether it is or is not Politically Correct (to e.g. infer one race is superior or inferior or to suggest that some sexual persuasion is bad) science requires the real scientist to tell the truth. However, that is not acceptable within academia. Because academia is an overwhelmingly politically “liberal” (PC, left of centre)
But the bigger problem is not that academics tend to be liberal, but that the system of peer review within academia creates a vicious cycle whereby certain views become more and more correct and all other views become unacceptable.
The problem stems from what academics call: “peer review”, but which increasingly know outside as “buddy review”. This and the way academia forces those writing for it, to “cite” “reliable” sources creates a huge compulsion to be “politically correct”.
Because as anyone who has ever tried editing Wikipedia on climate knows, by “reliable” what is really meant is “the politically correct view of liberal public-sector academia”. As such anyone who wants to be cited, must in turn be politically correct which means they must be liberal, anti-private sector and pro-establishment academia. The result, is a huge compulsion on those writing papers within academia to conform to the politically correct norm. And because the system is re-enforcing, it has become a vicious cycle of increasing political correctness distrust of outside views and conservatism.
Because, by politically correct, I don’t just mean lying about lack of significant differences (if they exist) in race or gender, or promoting “nannyism” in all its various forms, but also political within academia itself, in that new ideas must respect the internal politics of academia and not step on the toes of other academics.
The result, I think, having observed their appalling behaviour on global warming, is that academia has become one of the most conservative and repressive cultures in the world, and I think I would include in that comparison even extremist Islamic groups.
From industrial revolution to industrial pariah
Academics always like to think of themselves as being at the forefront of change. That unfortunately is another of their delusions and again based on a historical lie. The reality is very different.
The industrial revolution in Britain didn’t start with academic science as most children are now being taught in what has become a “religion of science”. Instead as the name implies, the industrial revolution started with engineers and industrialists, who used their practical skills, experience and understanding to build better and better machines; to build pumps to allow mining deeper and deeper; to observe the progressive layers of geology and their relationship in different areas to understand the 3D geological map under our feet and thereby locate new coal seams; doctors who used their knowledge to understand the body, and navigators who built better instruments and clocks to measure longitude.
They were the ones who literally created the modern world. They mapped the world, they worked out the progression of fossils which provide the key to unlock the geological time-line beneath our feet and from that sequence work out where the coal layers would surface; they created the modern industrial society with all its benefits, they created modern medicine & sanitation that means we all live longer.
The truth is that if academics played any role at all, it was secondary. As far as I can see, it wasn’t until well after the success of the industrialists, navigators, traders, etc., that academics were dragged by the burgeoning success of industry to try to find a role for themselves. And yes, there is not doubt their role was useful to industry. Because codifying and publicising the knowledge of engineers was a common good to all industrialists. But I have yet to find any evidence that academia led this industrial revolution.
The academic view of industry
Then much later came the “industrial slaughter” of WWI. That didn’t go down well with the academic dons who saw their pupils slaughtered on the battlefield. We can see this academic attitude toward industry if we look to the books of the time like “Lord of the rings”. Written by an Oxford academic, it portrays the industrial society of Mordor as dark, full of fire and brimstone, oppressive and evil. This is sharply contrasted with the “bright green healthy” almost Nazi-Arian view of society in the hobbit world of the shire or that of the “intellectual” (oxford don) elves.
Then we had WWII, where the failed Nazi/Arian war machine lost because of its (academic) obsession with new weaponry. Because like all “invented here made elsewhere” research from academia ever since, the Nazi academic research thankfully also created a lot of “not-quite-working” technology from rockets to nuclear, which the more pragmatic & therefore functional machinery of the allies obliterated.
In a real sense, WWII was where Mordor (British and Us industrialist) beat the Hobbits/Elves (Nazi-intellectuals).
But, unfortunately, the Nazi academics did enough to impress the allied academics, which is not surprising, but they also impressed politicians & military. So war crimes were ignored and Nazi war criminals brought their work as well as their ideas & culture into places like NASA.
Rather than learning the lessons that “hi-tech” or “academic” was the cause of Germany’s wartime failure, as Germany and Japan clearly did with great success, the UK & US academics enthused by their new Nazi colleagues with their new Nazi ideas of “progressive through hi-tech (high cost not quite working)”, began their own program of massive investment in “hi tech (high cost not quite working)”.
The result was inevitable.
So, since the Nazi academic ideas became endemic to US and UK science, we have followed the same downward curve of the Nazis with academics increasingly delving into areas they should not, increasingly seeing their role as instructing government how to run the country, and increasingly attacking and industry and engineering. With the inevitable result that both the US and UK have stagnated in our achievements with a “invented here made elsewhere) culture allowing other less stupid, less “hi-tech”/academic obsessed countries to overtake us.
A broken partnership
So, now the partnership that once existed between successful industry that led the world in Britain and an educated group who supported industry by codifying and disseminating its industrial knowledge has completely broken down. Because far from supporting industry, as it once did, now because of the culture exemplified in Lord of the Rings, academia has a vitriolic hatred of industry and the private sector, which it freely expresses through the proxy of CO2. Because from what I’ve seen of them on the internet, academics really don’t seem to care at all about the global temperature itself. It is almost a side issue compared to the much more key concern of academics who are obsessed with global warming which is that they want to get rid of industry, commerce and capitalism.
Or perhaps it is envy? That academia can’t stand all those upstart industrialists who rule the world – not because they are “intellectually superior” and so feel they can dictate what is politically correct – but because they just supply the world’s population with the goods and services they want. And boy do the academics seem to hate that!
Why modern academia is stagnating
So, the partnership between industry and academia is broken. But the real beneficiary of that partnership was not industry – which as the rest of the world shows, will steam on despite the lack of support from academia.
Instead the real losers from that broken partnership is academia itself. Because through that culture of hatred of industry and commerce, it has turned in on itself and become entirely inward looking. It seems to me that in the UK it has become excessively focussed on all that is “politically correct”. On the environment. On gender. On “racial harmony”. On social manipulation. On anti-industry CO2. On political marxism.
But because it is so political, within that kind of environment, where being politically correct is now a necessary requirement to being published and then being cited – both of which dictate progresion in academia – the pressure to conform has become so great that (if global warming is typical of academia) then in many areas progress is all but impossible.
Progress requires change. Change requires overturning old ideas. And a conservative institution inward looking culture like academia is challenged by new ideas. Thus, no academic can now challenge the established views of academia.
Instead, because academia can’t criticise itself, it must now find easy targets outside academia. This explains why people like Lewandowsky pick on sceptics. We are not part of the “in crowd”. We do not have huge coffers to afford to sue the shirt off his back for his lies. So Lewandowsky not only feels free to attack sceptics, it seems he feels compelled to attack us for just daring to not accept his politically correct views.
So, I have no doubt, that this kind of attitude and culture is now prevalent throughout academia. So that it is now standard practice to find external groups to attack & vilify (ironically at the same time as preaching harmony and tolerance to everyone).
But the one group who can never be challenged are academics themselves. Academics are a taboo, their ideas are sacrosanct, not even mother nature herself is allowed to contradict them.
And when even the clearest most unequivocal evidence contrary to the views of academia, such as mother nature’s failure to warm, cannot be tolerated, there is no doubt whatsoever that all new evidence is heavily repressed. As such it is certain that this repressive culture within academia is going to cause of stagnation.
The war is lost
After a decade and a half on global warming, where the evidence of their failure was blatantly obvious, yet the politically correct views dominated US and UK policy, I do not believe they have it within them to change.
There just is not the critical faculty within academia to impartially assess itself. And there are no other institutions in the US and UK which can challenge its supremacy in intellectual critique.
When the evidence against the global warming obsession was clear and unequivocally laid out in the pause and was (almost without exception) universally rejected by academia, there is not one hope in hell that US & UK academia could challenge itself on something so nuanced as its own culture.
As such, it is inevitable that the stagnation and decay of both US and UK academia and industry will continue – at least until the long term economic decay and success of other countries so destroys our ability to maintain the “cuckoo” in the nest and it dies from the economic decay it itself brought about.
To be totally frank: Obama and Merkel must find it incredibly difficult to understand politics where many people have given up trying to be heard by the biased media.
20 years ago, if you felt strongly about a subject, you’d write to the paper. And if you felt strongly about a subject that the journalists either didn’t like (sceptic) or couldn’t understand (science) then you’d struggle to get a letter published. As a result, the only way you’d get heard is by writing 100 letters to the press – and hoping one would get published. And as a result, whilst the press didn’t like some views, they heard they existed and even sometimes published them.
So, the press were hearing what the public thought – or at least those passionate to write to the press.
Then along comes the internet, and instead of spending an hour writing a letter, I can spend an hour writing a dozen comments to various blogs. You and me we’re hearing what the public thinks about global warming. But those idiots in the media – they’re not getting in anywhere near the number of letters, they aren’t being hassled by sceptics and when they publish their biased views as “science” … they’re not getting anywhere near the number of complaints they would have got 20 years ago.
But it gets worse. Because once many people found it was pointless writing to the press and found an outlet on the internet, then the press saw ever fewer letters expressing views they disliked. That allowed them to believe that there were even fewer people in the public with those views, and so they printed fewer letters, produced fewer supportive articles … and the public with alternative views became even more convinced that the media would not publish their views and so even fewer tried to contact journalists. It was a vicious cycle.
And visa versa, those views the journalists liked, found it easy to get their views heard, they therefore were encouraged to contact the journalists, and the journalists became even more convinced that the views they liked were in fact the same as all the public – and that the people posting online … were just a sordid delusional minority. This created a massive disparity. Views favoured by journalists – particularly from large organisations whose press releases could be copy-n-pasted found it incredibly easy to get published by the journalists in a virtuous cycle. Views the journalists didn’t like or found difficult to understand (science) and which came from individuals or small groups, got stuck into a vicious cycle or being more and more ignored, as fewer and fewer bothered to write to the press as more and more they went onto the internet.
So the press grew increasingly convinced that their view was “the public view” and that all those views they disliked were just a small out of touch irrelevant minority.
That was until it came to elections, when suddenly that sordid delusional “minority” began winning. “How did it happen”, is perhaps the catchphrase of the elites. “No one saw the banking crisis” (lie). “No one saw Brexit coming”, “No one saw the crash of confidence in climate”, “No one saw trump”, “No one saw the SNP”, etc. etc. etc. True if you read the biased press and listened the biased broadcasters in their echo-box of establishment views – you never saw it coming. But if you went online, you certainly saw them all coming.
The people who didn’t see, were the press and establishment politicians who had given up listening to the ordinary people who were now forced out onto the internet.
At yes, at first, those forced out were just the minority – but as more and more people got onto the internet, and as the press in their vicious cycle of decline became more and more biased in their views, the internet became the majority view. The internet supported Brexit, Trump, etc.
So, paradoxically, because of the internet the press went from being in the centre of public debate and hearing the diversity of views (even if they didn’t publish some) to being some of the most out of touch people on the planet (why read the internet when you can hear your own favourite views mirrored back to you by your own and other papers).
And as many politicians still rely on what they read in the broadcast media – they in turn are even more out of touch with the public views on a whole range of issues which are not popular with journalists.
Because journalists were biased – we moved online – so they stopped hearing from us – so they then imagined that what they saw on the internet represented a small group of delusional people, rather than the vast bulk of public opinion.