Hans Eysenck died in 1997. You probably never heard of him. He was the most-cited psychologist in Britain in the last half of the 20th century, mainly by writing harsh critiques of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, the unscientific nature of Freudian theories and the low quality of evidence that mental therapy actually worked. Last year, more than a dozen of Eysenck’s papers were retracted after an investigation by Kings College London. Eysenck apparently was better at identifying the flaws in other people’s reasoning, than in producing honest research of his own.
Stanford University’s John Ioannidis is a medical researcher who made waves in 2005 with a paper titled: “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”. He has published many papers on problems in clinical trials, economics, psychology, statistics, nutrition research and more. In a March 2020 article he observed that politicians were making decisions about how to respond to the coronavirus “without reliable data.” Still true. Ioannidis then predicted, based on the virus experiences on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, that around 10,000 people in the US would die from COVID-19. It looks like over 200,000 would have been a better estimate !
The lesson learned: Even the strongest critics of science need themselves to be criticized. Healthy science needs a whole community of skeptics, constantly arguing with one another … NOT A CONSENSUS. A consensus is meaningless in science. It is probably very negative, implying a lack of the needed skepticism.
Something has gone very wrong with science. There is too much consensus. There are too many character attacks on skeptics. There are too many studies that can't be replicated (half). And there are too many scientists predicting the future, almost always wrong, while the mainstream media loves their scary predictions, but not going back to examine how wrong their prior predictions were.
The coming climate change crisis is nothing more than a scary prediction that has been repeated 50 years in a row. The current climate is wonderful, yet there are more coming climate crisis "believers" than ever before! Not believers in climate change -- our planet's climate is ALWAYS changing -- but believers in a coming climate crisis that MUST be prevented at almost any cost !