Politics and science; is science being corrupted? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 05, 2010, 12:05 (5404 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: "The Guardian's [George] Monbiot gives a very fair guide to all the claims and counter-claims of climategate."-All the recent scandals highlight the fact that the sheer scale of human culture makes us dependent to a potentially disastrous degree on so-called experts. We have no choice. Politicians can take us to war on false (or falsified) information, bankers can take us to ruin through incompetence and greed, and scientists can wreck people's lives through personal, political or industrial agendas. Most of these disasters are built on our trust in their expertise.-Frighteningly, our society at large has become almost inured to the incompetence and/or dishonesty of the experts we rely on. We're allowed to moan about them, but beyond media pressure they appear to be untouchable. The tragedies of the Iraq War and of the economic recession, both of which have ended or ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, have passed without any action against the people responsible. Bush is enjoying his retirement, Blair is being paid millions for telling people what an honest man he is, and the bankers continue to pay themselves fat fortunes. It takes a journalist ... the same George Monbiot ... to set up a fund to encourage private individuals to make a citizen's arrest of Blair (thousands of pounds have been raised). The experts of the IPCC and the UEA are still in office, but the police are busy trying to find the "criminal" who leaked the emails that revealed the UEA deceptions. -However, do not despair. For the last few days, a lead story in our news bulletins has been the fact that the (married) captain of the England football team had an affair with the girlfriend of one of his team mates. The nation is split ... should he remain captain or not? That really gets people worked up, but in this case action will be taken. John Terry's future lies in the hands of Fabio Capello, the manager, who will make the decision once he's in possession of all the facts. I dimly remember a quote. Was it Groucho Marx? "A sense of proportion is a wonderful thing. Mine is 38-26-38"