Jane Caro – novelist and social commentator – typed a piece yesterday titled “Our Leaders Agree With Science When Science Agrees With Them“. In it, she gives credit to the conservatives (among other national and state leaders) who have heeded the doomsday predictions of discredited pandemic models and certainly saved us from an inevitable apocalypse.
It is a backhanded compliment though, as she quickly muses, “But I can’t help wondering why, in that case, when it comes to the science of climate change these same governments have been stubbornly looking away.“
She spends most of the article tediously railing against the very clear instructions from the National Cabinet based on the very clear advice from the scientific experts she says should be implicitly trusted.
She returns to the theme, concluding, “But what particularly interests me is how gung-ho our LNP federal government now is on trusting science. This is a radical change. A miracle, perhaps, wrought by COVID-19. They are happy to send teachers and students back into close proximity on the basis of evidence that is certainly not ‘settled’.“
Jane then rambles on with the usual, highly contended and discredited tripe routinely trotted out by climate alarmists, such as the claim, “It is estimated that somewhere between 97 and 99 percent of scientists accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change.” Australian John Cook came up with this number after sloppily including “climate experts” who believe the climate is changing but have no certainty it is anthropogenic. A scientist’s propaganda is not science, Jane.
But even if 99% of scientists agreed on anything, science is not a popularity contest. Scepticism, questioning and continually testing assumptions and even accepted hypotheses is a fundamental ingredient of the scientific method. Full consideration must be given to just one scientist dissenting from the status quo, instead of religious obeisance to the majority.
Radical leftists like Caro are religious. She even admits hopes of a “sincere conversion regarding science” among our leaders. They worship at the altar of Scientism, the sacrifice of democracy for technocracy, being ruled by people with technical qualifications instead of elected representatives. In Jane Caro’s mind, an elected leader who doesn’t blindly follow the policy prescriptions of scientists (scientism) is irresponsible and willfully ignorant. The irony could be cut with a knife.
The nuanced but profound difference between a right-thinking person’s regard for science and a leftist is the careful consideration of other factors, such as the long-term consequences and short-term costs of various policy suggestions, as well as the moral, ethical and social realities which also contextualise every policy decision.
As even Michael Moore has finally come to the understanding of, there is still no such thing as “green energy”. As much as we can accept the fact the climate is (and always has been) changing, moralising against the evils of plundering the earth for coal while suggesting instead mining quartz and much more to make short-lived, still relatively inefficient solar panels at much greater cost is foolish. The net benefit to the environment of “green energy” is at best negligible and at worst harmful. Science is an important part of this debate, but far from settled and far from the paramount consideration.
But here’s the juiciest hypocrisy in Jane Caro’s ideological ravings about selective agreement with science. Jane is pro-abortion, but 96% of biologists agree each human life begins at fertilisation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights observes “All members of the human family” have “the right to life, liberty and security of person“, and that “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.“
Radical feminists like Jane Caro are selectively dismissive of science when it removes all doubt to the humanity and personhood of preborn children, so devastatingly to their pro-abortion dogma. They’re forced to either deny science and contort themselves in absurd contortions around the inescapable truth, or they must adopt the extreme autonomy argument, acknowledge the preborn child’s humanity and psychopathically claim a right to deliberately execute living humans.
Feminists and leftists, it appears, only agree with science when science agrees with them.
