The Abuse of Science

Disclaimer: I am not against science in any way. My father was a PhD chemist, and I was raised on a healthy dose of science fiction. I still consider Star Trek's Science Officer Mr. Spock to be one of the greatest characters in science fiction history. I believe science is the means by which humanity will advance to our next stage of evolution as a species.

All that said, we are terribly abusing science for humanity's political ends.

Remember in World War II, when the Nazis performed science experiments on Holocaust victims? That kind of crap hasn't ended. From The Nation:

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

Sound familiar? From Josef Mengele's Wikipedia entry:

Josef Mengele (16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Mengele was a notorious member of the team of doctors responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners. Arrivals deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were immediately killed in the gas chambers.

At least Mengele had somewhat higher motives:

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his anthropological studies and research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. The experiments had no regard for the health, safety, or physical and emotional suffering of the victims. He was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia iridum (eyes of two different colours), dwarfs, and people with physical abnormalities. 

By comparison, the American doctors are just trying to figure out better ways to torture people. Explain to me again how Nazis were worse than Americans? Back to The Nation article:

To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.”

I would argue this abuse of psychological science for the political ends of fighting terrorism is no better than the abuse of climate science for the political ends of promoting socialist and progressive politics throughout the world. When socialism ruins a country's economy, the economic devastation can lead to untold deaths from starvation, disease, and crime. The shared misery of socialism just puts more people in danger, whereas real capitalism (not crony capitalism like we have today) provides people a means of escaping poverty.

(The next argument is, "But what about Europe?" My response is Margaret Thatcher's response, about how socialism only works until it "run[s] out of other people's money". Europe is still burning through its wealth, but you can see the socialist experiment is starting to fray at the edges, with Greece, Spain and Italy being carried along by the wealthier nations of the European Union.)

No, the flaw in climate science is the abuse of models, both scientific and economic, for purposes of proving a flawed theory, namely man-made global warming. How can we justify man-made global warming when the big hot ball in the sky is the source of the 99%+ of this planet's heat? Remove the sun from this "experiment", and the Earth's global warming disappears. I will personally guaranty it.

Until climate science can determine what percentage of the Earth's climate is influenced by the sun, any estimates on human impact are anthropocentric at best.

But the economic damage caused by such madness can significantly divert funds from the economy to causes that would never survive the creative destruction of capitalism. While I think sustainable energy sources would be good for science to pursue, I also think having politicians decide the winners and losers of such pursuit is a bad idea. When politicians decide, we get things like corn-based ethanol that takes more energy to produce than it creates.

Regardless of whether your politics are on the Right, Left, or somewhere else, the abuse of science for political motives must end.

Personally, I blame human stupidity. It is one thing to trust science, but it is another when a politician takes a scientific result to promote his own policies. Most people will eagerly say politicians lie, but then turn around and naively believe them when they propose something because of science, regardless of whether the science is accurate.

The worst part? Most climate science research is funded by your tax dollars, which get channeled to climate science by...drum roll...politicians! In other words, you voted for the method of your own destruction.

(hat tip to Buzzfeed for the GIF)

In summary, the abuse of science is created by politicians who get elected by ignorant voters. Then the politicians use the abused science to sell voters on the bad ideas which hand more power to the politicians. From finding the best methods to torture people, to creating fantasy catastrophes to remove economic prosperity from people and hand it to the politicians, the abuse of science continues.