by k3nt » Sat Feb 03, 2007 11:42 pm
I don't hate Republicans. I don't see this as a Republican / Democrat issue at all. It's a reality vs. non-reality issue. Heck, George Bush has faced up to the reality, or at least he seemed to in his State of the Union speech. Conservative politicians in the USA and around the world are on board with the basic reality here. Nobody is left refusing to face reality except for the oil companies themselves.
"It is hard to get a man to understand a fact, when his paycheck depends upon his not understanding that fact." Not sure where I heard that, but it applies here. It's just like the tobacco companies were the very last ones in the world to grasp that just maybe their product might cause cancer.
But whatever your views on the reality of global warming, this is messed up. "I'll pay you ten thousand bucks if you'll write something that looks scientific and comes to the conclusion I want to come to." Doesn't matter what scientific issue you're talking about, that's just wrong. I mean, it's understandable for a corporation to fight for its profits ... but what they're promoting sure as sh*t ain't science.
I mean, what happens if you took the AEI up on their offer, and then used their money to actually do the best research you could do -- and then came to the conclusion that the AEI is wrong? Uh-oh. The AEI is not paying for honest research, they're paying for a conclusion.
Science just is not done this way. It's not funded this way. When it is funded this way, it is no longer science, but issue advocacy. Scientific inquiry is about looking for the right answer and following your results wherever they lead, not justifying a predetermined answer. I would have thought that was too obvious to need mentioning.