“..I’m thinking of something generically science. It could develop subgroups, but more important than anything else is simply to be guardians of The Method. To stand up for logic and reason and the hunt for the Truth, above all else. To rise above the corrupting influences (is that possible?). To stop science being used as a tool against the people (by it’s misapplication, misappropriation, through lies by omission, or monopsonistic funding.” ~ JoNova
She sounds as if she’s channeling Michael Crichton:
“...we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead. ... How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline?
There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of the politization of so-called facts that simply aren’t true.
It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way.
Not at all-—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politcized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over.
What we need is .. an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will ___fund identical research projects to more than one group___, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politcized, then we are lost.
We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past.
So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that. ~ Michael Crichton Environmentalism as Religion - Here: http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/index.html
bttt
The problem is that somehow envuironmental studies became a discipline separate from chemistry or physics or geology or biology or oceanography, and wandered into an interdisciplinary discipline that was and had no discipline at all. Starting from a foundation in each of these branches of knowledge combined with a bunch of courses on environmental policy it is almost impossible to become a disciplined scientist. Evniron 1 + chem 1 + Phys1 + bio 1 + rocks of jocks does not make you a laboratory scientist.
There has been some excellent scientific work in this area, and it is almost all done by PhD chemists or physicists or geologists or some such. It just takes that level of training and specialization to master a technique that can provide new insights and knowledge.