Being in my mid-thirties, and therefore a legitimate, card-carrying member of Ye Olde Phartes Clubbe – I have the hip and knee pains to prove it – provides a certain perspective on life that the younger and, shall we say, less world-weary among you might find refreshing.

With age comes cynicism, and with cynicism comes stoic acceptance of the fact that, basically, we live in a world built on lies.

Indeed, the older I get, the more I become convinced that the absolute best way to tell whether something is a lie or not, is to see how much it is being hyped up and proselytised by the people in positions of power.

There is no better example of this than the hysteria over “man-made climate change”.

The constant bombardment of “climate change” propaganda has reached positively ridiculous levels these days. But I am so old and grey that I remember back to my elementary school days when this particularly irritating brand of bullshit was then named “global warming”.

Back when I were a wee lad – approximately a thousand years ago, or so it would seem – I was told over and over and over and over AND OVER AND BLOODY OVER again that Mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions were causing severe warming across the entire world due to the “well-known” greenhouse effect of such gases.

I ate that shit up with a spoon when I was a child, simply because I didn’t know any better. Every single source of authority in my young life at the time told me that it was true, so as far as I was concerned, It Was True.

Of course, with the passage of time and the acquisition of not inconsiderable amounts of grey hair has come that most precious of commodities, wisdom. And part of that process of acquiring wisdom involved looking at sources that disagreed with what I was originally taught.

And over time I observed a rather curious phenomenon.

Starting about 15 years ago, or thereabouts, the “consensus” over “anthropogenic global warming” shifted subtly but clearly toward “climate change”. And the reason for it was very simple – the evidence simply did not support the theory.

Satellite data measuring heating and cooling in the troposhere showed that the world had basically stopped warming and temperatures were holding stable. All of the doomsday predictions that the climate alarmists had made in the early-to-mid-90s about what would happen in the early-to-mid-2000s, had simply failed to materialise. Their computer models were hopelessly inaccurate, because they were taking garbage data in, running that through garbage computer code, and producing garbage results.

It is a basic truism of life that you can hide the truth for a very long time – but eventually, the lies that you have to tell grow so large, complex, and confusing, that they inevitably collapse.

So it was with the “man-made global warming” scam.

That Jenga tower of lies that the global warming alarmists had built up over many years, came crashing down over 10 years ago when the Climategate scandal broke:

Now, to hear the alarmists tell the story, there was no scandal whatsoever. The infamous “hide the decline” email was taken out of context, they said. The email in which Kevin Trenberth said, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”, was grossly mischaracterised, they claimed.

(The Infogalactic version of the same article isn’t very much better. That whole episode is in dire need of serious research and investigation. Wikipedia is hopelessly converged on the subject. Infogalactic quite obviously is not being used in the way that it should, which is very unfortunate – I write that as one of the Original Galaxians who funded the project back in the day. But, it is what it is. All we can do is continue to plug away and build out the database and wait for the day when – not if – Wikipedia finally collapses under the weight of its own convergence and stupidity.)

However the alarmists try to spin things, though, there is one problem that they simply cannot get past.

And that is the fact that, as the video points out early on, the same data set was processed by two different teams and showed radically different conclusions.

The infamous “Mann Hockey Stick Graph” was generated by a man-made algorithm that, apparently, would have produced a hockey-stick outcome NO MATTER WHAT THE INPUT DATA SAID.

The degree of fraud perpetrated by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was so great, in fact, that the Supreme Court of British Columbia not only threw out Dr. Mann’s defamation lawsuit against one of his critics, but the court then proceeded to slap Dr. Mann with the bill for the full weight of the legal costs of his opponent.

Furthermore, Dr. Mann could very easily have resolved the entire controversy over how he ended up with such a spectacular result simply by releasing his entire dataset. But he repeatedly refused to do this – because if he did, any and all scientific fraud that he may or may not have perpetrated, would have come to light instantly.

That particular sordid episode is emblematic of what has happened to the entire “scientific community” in the past thirty years or so.

A lot of people who don’t know any better, and really should, have a serious fetish about “science”. They claim that SCIENCE!!! is the key to solving all of the world’s problems – not faith, not philosophy, not investigation into the natural world rooted in reverence for the Bible, none of that. Just SCIENCE!!!

The moment that you ask them what, exactly, they mean by SCIENCE!!!, though, they get quite flummoxed.

They will usually start off by claiming that SCIENCE!!! is what scientists do. This is not correct. That is known as scientistry.

They might then move on to the idea that SCIENCE!!! is about testing a hypothesis using methods of trial-and-error, observation, statistical inference, and carefully constructed lab experiments. This is also not correct. That is known as scientody, the scientific method, which is the accepted and established method of exploring the world through observation, inference, hypothesis-testing, and experimentation.

In some desperation, they could then state that SCIENCE!!! is about the body of available knowledge out there that we can test and check and figure out whether it works. And that, too, is not correct. That is what we call scientage, the (enormous) body of scientifically testable knowledge.

Taken together, scientody, scientage, and scientistry are all part of what most people mistakenly think of as “science”. But the moment that you remove one of the three legs upon which all of science rests, then you no longer have science at all.

You have, instead, scientism – the ideology of scientists who believe passionately in hypotheses that are either: a) not tested; b) not testable; c) not falsifiable; or, worst of all, d) flat-out wrong.

The ideology of scientists is extremely dangerous. It can lead to some very dark and dangerous places, because it blinds scientists into thinking of themselves as dispassionate seekers and observers of the truth.

This is simply not the case. Most scientists are totally blind to the flaws in their own fields of research. They lack the basic humility and self-awareness to realise that the trust that the average person has in them, only lasts if they earn it.

That is part of the reason why science as a whole is suffering from a very serious credibility crisis.

This is known as the Reproducibility Crisis. In some fields open to scientific exploration, like psychology – look, lads, I know it’s ridiculous to put “psychology” and “science” in the same sentence like that, but we’ll roll with it for now, and let’s keep the belly laughs to a minimum – the rate at which commonly accepted findings cannot be replicated is a staggering 66% in some cases.

Here’s one good example.

One of the simplest and most well-known findings in the entire field of psychology relates to the “fact” that smiling automatically makes someone feel better, no matter what his or her mental state beforehand. Turns out, even a finding that straightforward, cannot be properly replicated.

Now obviously, just because something cannot be easily replicated, that does not mean that it is not true or does not exist. But, if repeated trials and tests of the same data set by different people keep yielding totally different results, then the problem isn’t with the data – it’s with the people.

To paraphrase our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day, there is a word for replicable, reliable, dependable scientific results. That word is, of course, engineering.

Engineers use the results discovered by scientific exploration all the time. A bridge across a river exists because of well-known and well-understood principles in physics and chemistry that relate to force, torque, tension, friction, corrosion, heat expansion (and contraction) of metals, and dozens of other fields.

You, as the user of the bridge, don’t even have to worry about any of that stuff. But the engineers who planned and built that bridge, have to worry themselves sick about whether they’ve applied the basic scientific principles correctly.

Neither you nor they have to worry about whether the science behind it all is true. It simply is, because it has been tested hundreds or thousands or even MILLIONS of times.

That fact, in and of itself, goes a very long way toward explaining why the US Navy can take grass-green 18-year-old boys who have trouble growing anything beyond peach fuzz on their faces and have nothing more than high-school educations (and sometimes not even that much), and train them as reactor technicians on nuclear submarines.

Those boys are in charge of systems that will KILL them, in absolutely horrible ways, if they screw up so much as one turn of a dial. Everyone around them will DIE if they get it wrong.

Yet they don’t. The reactor safety record of American nuclear carriers, destroyers, and submarines is superb, considering the size of the nuclear fleet and the extreme complexity of the systems.

Climate science, on the other hand, is in very deep cacky precisely because its most basic principles are not transparent or open to testing.

The most basic of those assumptions, that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere drive higher temperatures, has been shown to be conclusively WRONG, repeatedly. The best evidence that we have available shows clearly that carbon dioxide emissions lag temperature changes, by about 800 years.

This simply means that, assuming carbon dioxide changes have anything at all to do with temperature changes, whatever we are seeing now in terms of CO2 levels, is in large part correlated with something that happened about 800 years ago.

It should be clear to all but the most fervent AGW booster that 800 years ago there were no cars, the world’s population was a fraction of what it is now, meat consumption was a TINY fraction of what it is these days, and air travel wasn’t a thing at all.

That is not to say that CO2 changes have nothing to do with warming or cooling the world. It simply says that CO2 changes do not cause temperature changes.

So what does cause global temperature changes?

Well, how much time do you have?

Because we’d have to go and look at what ocean currents are doing, because those operate on time lags of anywhere between five hundred and ten thousand years.

And then we’d have to go look at sunspot activity, which unlike CO2 has a pretty tight correlation with temperature changes.

And then we’d have to go look at cosmic radiation levels bombarding the Earth’s atmosphere, because the Earth’s cloud cover formation is heavily affected by massive gamma ray bursts in deep space caused by supernovae that send huge amounts of dangerous radiation straight at us – and that only gets stopped by our atmosphere and magnetosphere, and by the Sun’s magnetic field, otherwise we’d all be quite dead.

And then we’d have to look at where the Earth is in its Solar orbital cycle, because the planets do not orbit in perfect circles but in ellipses. Those ellipses affect the amount of radiation that the Earth is getting at any given point in time, and there is variability in that orbit over a period of centuries and millennia.

And then we’d have to look at where the Solar System is in its rotation around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, because that does affect the amount of radiation that Earth gets.

And then we’d have to take a quick look at where the Milky Way Galaxy is in relation to the rest of the galaxies in our neighbourhood, especially the ones with active stellar nurseries.

THAT is the level of detail that we have to look into. It is just NOT as simple as “MUH CARBON DIOXIDE!!!”.

In conclusion – SCIENCE!!! is just a tool to go find the truth. In fact, it is several tools packed into one. Science is not an ideology or a goal unto itself. It merely gives us accurate insights into the world around us. And if those who profess to use it as a tool do not themselves tell the truth whenever necessary, then they cannot and should not be taken seriously, no matter how good their credentials are.