Monday, September 15, 2008

Stop Studying, Now!

Roger Ebert should stick to movie reviews:
I want a vice president who . . .doesn't appoint Alaskan politicians to "study" global warming, because, hello! It has been studied.
So has phrenology, alchemy and the labor theory of value, but further "study" and experience proved otherwise.

Miley Cyrus knows more about warming than Ebert. Still, the article explains Ebert's three-and-a-half stars rating for Fahrenheit 9/11: he never questioned the claims because, hello!, the actual facts have been studied. And if we ain't gonna study warming no more, Ebert surely will favor firing the biased bureaucrats and grant-hungry scientists who, hello!, turn taxes into warming studies.

(via Best of the Web)

4 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

I always tended to agree with Ebert more than Siskel, when they differed -- but subsequent attention to his reviews post-Siskel have shown that it was the interplay which kept Ebert on the right "path". He needed Siskel as a counterweight. Haven't felt much need to pay attention to him since.

OBloodyHell said...

P.S. The real point is that previous "studies" don't necessarily mean jack in science.

Sometimes, there's an experiment waiting just around the corner (Michaelson-Morley, for example) waiting to dispel a generally accepted theory (aether physics)

The process never ends.

The Scientific Method does not lead into a harbor or a port -- it is a voyage further and further into the Sea of Truth. And the ship floats by means of experimentation ...and "studies".

MaxedOutMama said...

Aside from the validity of OBH's points, the problem with much of climate science is that it has been completely bogus. This is science founded on computer modeling that is uncorrelated with observed reality.

Western climate science really isn't science. It's all hypothesis. See, for example, the results of checking sea level rise predictions.

OBloodyHell said...

> the problem with much of climate science is that it has been completely bogus.

But of course.

But that's not at the heart of what Ebert says -- he not only doesn't realize that the science itself is wrong, he doesn't even realize that his entire understanding of what science **is** is utterly wrong.

He's like a man blind from birth attempting to critique Mel Brooks' Silent Movie.