In the 1980s, Scientific American (SA) was sold to a German publlosher Holtzbrinck. That's when it began to publish speculative stories about science, instead of reports by scientists, about real scientific studies. Holtzbrinck still owns it, under their MacMillan publishing subsidiary.
SA magazine was taken over by leftists, and they have joined the smarmy environmental apocalyptic doomsday cult. SA found a secular religion, and they are true believers. SA has not been scientific for a long time. I quit reading it over two decades ago.
SA has stopped practicing true science: skepticism. Scientists should always be skeptical of theories, and studies that test theories, looking for faults, biases, and limitations, They should actively seek to falsify existing theories with tough empirical tests.
How many climate papers get published by SA and others take a skeptic's viewpoint? For example, to demonstrate poor predictive abilities of climate models, or to show biases involved in repeatedly "adjusting" historic temperature records? Answer: None.
At the beginning of the Trump administration in January 2017, leftist biased media accused Trump and his people of being “anti-science.” SA had published a piece on January 18, 2017 with the title: “Trump’s 5 Most Anti-Science Moves.” They see“science” not as a special methodology, but something more like: 'science is whatever people who call themselves scientists do.'
The basic complaint is that Trump was “anti-science” because he was listening to, or appointing, people who disagreed with bureaucrats and agencies in the government who called themselves scientists.
CONSENSUS SCIENCE IS NOT REAL SCIENCE:
Real science is a process for understanding reality, through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify a falsifiable hypotheses.
In recent decades, SA has defended many non-falsifiable claims, mainly its advocacy of climate change alarmism. An SA article typically assumes that science is evidenced by a consensus of expert opinion. They fail to understand that peer review is often the byproduct of peer pressure to agree with the consensus. SA calls the people who actually understand what science is: “anti-science.”
"Consensus science" is not real science at all. It is actually the suppression of intellectual diversity. And that suppression is part of the socialist necessity for complete control of the individual. The “truth” becomes whatever is deemed true by the authorities -- something that MUST be believed in the interest of national unity.
Consensus is really about politics, not science. The truth or falsity of a scientific proposition is NOT established by a popular vote of experts. A vote of experts is not necessary to validate the proposition inherent in Einstein’s formula E = MC2, or that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, or that Earth is on average, 149,668,992,000 meters (93 million miles) from the sun.
CURRENT ISSUE OF SA:
A recent issue of SA has an article by Mano Singham, with the title:
“The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth; It’s time we abandoned the notion.” Singham is a member of the American Physical Society, and a retired professor from Case Western Reserve University.
Singham defines "consensus" within a scientific context, and presents a scheme for determining whether "consensus" has been achieved . He does not mention consensus outliers, such as Galileo, or some established theories, such as Newton's, that met up with Einstein. It seems strange that an author searching for truth is advocating the submission to orthodoxy and conventional wisdom. Consider the following two examples of conventional scientific "wisdom":
(1)
Malthus made his famine predictions believing farmers could only produce corn yields of 20 bushels per acre. 150 years later, a man named David Hula produced over 600 bushels of corn per acre, and he thinks 800 bushels per acre are possible. Not corn grown in a CO2 enhanced lab. He grew the corn outdoors on an actual farm. In Virginia. Not in the mid-west 'Corn Belt'.
(2)
William Jevons famously predicted that we would run out of coal, and all die cold and hungry during the 19th century ... yet today the climate alarmists are angry because we haven't run out of coal to burn.
Singham begins his SA article by acknowledging that "ever since the seminal work of philosopher of science Karl Popper, for a scientific theory to be worthy of its name, it has to be falsifiable by experiments or observations.”
He then veers off the science road and claims there is a new field, “science studies”, that “comprises the history, philosophy and sociology of science.” People in this new field have now demonstrated that “falsification cannot work, even in principle.” His explanation is gibberish.
A falsifiable hypothesis is one that predicts effects or consequences that a person can actually test with an experiment or observation. So, an observation contrary to the hypothesis is, ostensibly, falsifying a falsifiable hypothesis. I say "ostensibly" because hypotheses often rest on other, sometimes unrecognized, claims, and the contrary observation might call into question one of the underlying claims, rather than the hypothesis itself.
GLOBAL WARMING:
Anthropogenic (human caused) Global Warming (AGW) theory predicts that man's activities, and greenhouse gas emissions, will cause warming temperatures that melt glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, and increasingly frequent and severe storms.
To prove the AGW theory, you would need to demonstrate that during periods of increasing human caused greenhouse gas emissions there HAS been steadily rising temperatures, faster melting of glaciers, increasingly rising sea levels, and more droughts and storms that CAN NOT be attributed to natural causes (such as changing sun activity) or natural climate variations (temperatures similarly warm, seas similarly high, and glaciers similarly melted, during periods BEFORE humans started burning fossil fuels).
AGW theory has been falsified by historic records, and failed climate model predictions. No climate change in the past 200 years has been unprecedented, during 4.5 billion years of natural causes of climate change So the coming climate change crisis believers added to the theory to make it non-falsifiable. Now AGW predicts heat waves and droughts are caused by man's activities, and ALSO severely cold winters and lots of snow and rain and subsequent floods. AGW now also predicts increasingly severe and frequent storms, and ALSO increasing calm and stability.
AGW can now allegedly predict both hot and cold, dry and wet, and storm and calm, it is now called man-made "climate change"because it predicts everything, which means it can't be falsified. The AGW hypothesis has become the TOE; the Theory of Everything.
Climate "science" is based on computer programs (computer games that are nothing more than personal opinions) that purport to have predictive ability. If that was true, they should be able to replicate the historical climate. Let's "turn on" their model, beginning 2,000 years ago, and have it "run" until the present day. That would demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of the models to replicate the climate over that time period. They will not do it because the models will be shown to be wrong. The models won't even be able to replicate the climate over the past 200 years.
If the computer games REALLY understood climate change physics, they would be able to EXPLAIN the historic climate regimes;
e.g what caused the ice ages?
what caused the Medieval Warm Period?
what caused prior ice ages to end?
if elevated CO2 levels caused pre-human
warming, from where did the CO2 arise
and why did the CO2 levels
become elevated?
to where did all the CO2 disappear,
and why, such that an ice age
commenced?
Climate change "scientists" cannot explain the historical climate, and yet they claim they can predict the future climate?
Climate change alarmists, if they want to make any kind of legitimate claim to the mantle of “science,” need to specify the falsifiable hypothesis they claim has been established. Until they do that, their assertions have no claim to the label of “established science”. Right now we have climate assertions that can never be falsified: Unusually cool weather is just "weather". Unusually warm weather is "climate change".
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER, ON SCIENCE
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. ... Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
Dwight. D. Eisenhower, 1961
Scientific American is part of the problem Eisenhower warned us about.
WHAT IS REAL SCIENCE?
"A good theory makes clear-cut testable predictions. A bad theory is so malleable it can be adjusted to account for any data."
- Martin Rees
Experimental physicist David Deutsch says science is the search for better explanations. The scientific method was developed gradually by some of the great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, especially Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton.
As physicists Richard Feynman and Andrew Galambos explained, there are four steps to the scientific method:
(1)
Observation for data gathering
(2)
Hypothesis formulation—a guess or a speculation, based on observations, that seeks to explain natural phenomena
(3)
Extrapolation from the hypothesis—a prediction about previously inexplicable or unknown phenomena
(4)
Observation for corroboration of the prediction
ENGINEERING IS DIFFERENT:
Engineers design real things, and what they design will work, or not work, as designed. This constant comparison of "theory" versus real world performance forces engineers - whether they like it or not - to be grounded in reality.
BUSINESS SCHOOLS ARE BIASED:
Lots of leftist ideology has entered business schools these day.. Human relations and management studies are all in on diversity as our strength, sustainability for competitive advantage, and stakeholder "capitalism". The "research" that is done on those topics is clearly designed to confirm the desired leftist outcome.
Unless you study Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM), the money spent on college for your children is being wasted on leftist indoctrination. Hillsdale College, here in Michigan, is a rare exception.