But what interested me was this paragraph towards the end of the article:
And as noted by Steven Milloy in his Junk Science column the consequences of making policy based on bad science are no laughing matter. It is unacceptable for leaders to ignore the data.
What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"
The more inconvenient the facts, the more important that the data be published and reviewed.
Fortunately, the Internet makes it much harder to suppress inconvenient facts.
Unfortunately a lot of powerful and influential people are going to look really silly as the evidence mounts.
And as noted by Steven Milloy in his Junk Science column the consequences of making policy based on bad science are no laughing matter. It is unacceptable for leaders to ignore the data.
(credit to Drudge Report for noting the first two articles I've linked in this post.)
