Everything Wrong With COVID “Science” Has Been Wrong With Climate Science for Longer

Matt PalumboApril 15, 2022

There’s no question that COVID presented a tremendous challenge for scientists. We’re talking about a pandemic that took the world by storm, was killing large numbers of people, and initially, we had very few answers to the questions that mattered most.

Who was most vulnerable? Did masks prevent COVID? Could you get it from touching things an infected person had touched? Why did some people get extremely sick while others weren’t impacted? What are the best ways to treat people with COVID? Was it safe for people to congregate outside? Could masks shut down COVID? Why did some people get long-term COVID while others didn’t? Was the virus man-made or naturally occurring? What was the best way to keep the population safe while minimally disrupting our society?

Two years out from the virus, we STILL don’t have the answers to many of those questions and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Science is often a laborious and messy process that can take years of competing experiments to produce answers to the questions it sets out to answer – if it ever does. For example, what could be more basic than the food we eat? Yet, there is no definitive answer on what foods we should eat to be healthy. Certainly, there are some strong indications about what foods we SHOULDN’T eat (seed oils, sugar, highly processed foods, and fried foods), but should you go vegetarian? Vegan? Carnivore? Paleo? Proponents of all those foods can make excellent arguments, backed by scientific studies, that their way of eating is the best. Even though it’s an extremely important question, it’s impossible to say with certainty at this point.

Scientists studying COVID were faced with that same dilemma. People were DYING and looking to them for answers that they simply didn’t have. So, in many cases, they took their best guesses. That’s not an unreasonable way to approach the situation as long as everyone is being honest about what’s happening.

In other words, it’s perfectly fine to say, “We’re consulting with some of the best people in the field and we can tell you that based on the limited research we have, this is what we think the best way to go seems to be. That being said, it may change in the future as we get better data.”

The problem with taking that approach is that people, especially when it comes to their health, prefer to hear definite answers. That goes double when you’re talking about something they may be reluctant to do, like take a brand-new vaccine, wear masks that they find annoying, or shut down their businesses.

So, what happened with COVID when the scientists wanted to steer the public towards what their “best guesses” were about how to handle the pandemic? They made claims they couldn’t back up and called it “science.” Then, they encouraged censorship of people who pointed out their lies. They waived off all doubt and proclaimed that questioning their views, many of which were politically motivated, was the same as questioning science itself. What was it that Anthony Fauci said when he was criticized?

“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

That was the attitude from the get-go. As if questioning the conclusions and tactics used to fight COVID was the equivalent of questioning whether gravity existed or whether the Earth was round. It was a mixture of science AND political activism. Also, as you’d expect, it was often wrong. Actually, masking the general public didn’t stop COVID. COVID doesn’t appear to spread very well by touch. We aren’t seeing very much transmission of COVID outdoors. The vaccines did save a lot of lives, but no, they weren’t anywhere near as effective at stopping people from getting the virus as advertised. Lockdowns were a disastrously bad idea. At this point, it’s also abundantly clear that firing people for not being vaccinated makes no rational sense. For that matter, vaccinating healthy children clearly makes no sense, but we’re doing it anyway.

Now, if all of this had been done THE RIGHT WAY, with genuine open debate, SOME of the same mistakes would have been made. However, we also would have avoided a lot of mistakes. Would we have had lockdowns? Maybe, but if so, we can be sure the lockdowns wouldn’t have lasted as long in some parts of the country. There’s absolutely no chance we would have been demanding that people be fired for not taking a vaccine that doesn’t prevent people from getting COVID. Additionally, things like masking and vaccinating healthy children seem to be almost completely politically driven. It’s hard to imagine a free and open scientific debate leading to healthy children being vaccinated. On top of all this, the public wouldn’t have lost faith in what they hear from so many “scientists.”

Science is still respected by the public, but there’s now an element of doubt about scientists telling the public the truth that really wasn’t present before. Overall, that will hurt our society and science itself in the long run, but it is at least likely to have the advantage of opening many people’s eyes to the extraordinarily sketchy “science” involved in global warming.

First of all, keep in mind that we think the earth is 4.5 BILLION – yes, with a “b” – years old. Additionally, our best guess is that humans evolved 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Out of all that time, do you know long we’ve had actual global temperature readings we can look back at? Only 142 years:

People have been measuring temperature since Galileo’s time, and the modern thermometer was invented in the early 1700s. Formal weather stations, which before the mid-1800s were mostly in Europe and the US, became ubiquitous enough by 1880 to provide a robust picture of global temperature. But the vast majority of other, older climate data still isn’t digitized.

When people say things like, “This is the hottest year on record,” they mean since 1880. Additionally, there are certainly reasonable questions that can be asked about how accurate that data is over time. Things like cities, factories, and roads can drive up the temperature in an area. Is it really getting hotter in some of these areas, or did they go from an isolated region to a populated one?

Of course, scientists do have different ways of measuring temperature further back than 1880 but calling them “questionable” would be a compliment:

Some common examples of climate proxies are rocks, ice cores, tree rings, fossils, lake, and sea sediments etc. They act as “natural climatic archives” as they contain imprints of the ambient temperature conditions on them.

We can speculate that these methods might be accurate, but of course, until someone invents a time machine, there’s no way to go back in time and figure out if they’re right or not. In other words, much of our data before 1880 is little more than ultimately unverifiable educated guesses.

On top of all that, just as we’ve seen with COVID, this issue has been heavily politicized and the scientific debate around it has been stifled. The amount of money that’s pouring into the field, not for an open scientific debate, but to promote the pro-manmade global warming point of view, is so huge it’s almost beyond belief:

According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009.”

…How big is the Climate Change Industrial Complex today? Surprisingly, no one seems to be keeping track of all the channels of funding. A few years ago, Forbes magazine went through the federal budget and estimated about $150 billion in spending on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term.

…Worldwide the numbers are gargantuan. Five years ago, a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative issued a study which found that “Global investment in climate change” reached $359 billion that year.

The whole global warming industry is a gravy train – as long as you say what the people doling out the money want to hear. If scientists that worked for the tobacco industry told you that smoking cigarettes is the healthiest thing you can do, no one in their right mind would take that at face value. Despite protests you may hear to the contrary, this is no different.

It’s also well worth noting that the United States is not even the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases. Per the EPA:

What this means is that even if we went down the crazy Left’s entire wish list on this issue and banned gasoline-powered engines, ended domestic air flights, and got rid of those awful farting cows, it ultimately wouldn’t fix any kind of global problem. In other words, even if global warming were real, caused by man, and was guaranteed to lead to disaster, the only realistic potential solution would be geoengineering projects. Here’s one recent example of a potential technique that’s being studied:

“Geoengineering is a blanket term for technologies that try to alter Earth’s physical qualities on the largest scale possible,” Popular Mechanics reported. “One example is cloud seeding, where airplanes flush clouds with particulate matter in order to coalesce into rain.”

Solar geoengineering involves using technology to try to reflect solar radiation back into space before it can interact with greenhouse gases. The most commonly proposed method is to use aerosols — “the gaseous clouds formed by particles of many common materials” — because the physical structure of their particles blocks and scatters light, according to Popular Mechanics.

But solar geoengineering is controversial, even according to the Harvard researchers who proposed the experiment. For one thing, the methods could have unintended consequences on global weather patterns.

Put another way, we have a fairly primitive understanding of our climate and we’re terrified we might cause some kind of cataclysm by messing around with the climate on a global scale. That’s a wise approach to take given our current knowledge level. We can’t tell you definitively if it will rain tomorrow. We can’t predict exactly where a hurricane is going. We certainly don’t know enough to try to change the world climate and while we’re at it, anyone who’s honest would admit that there’s not a living soul on this planet who has any idea what the global climate is going to look like in 100 years.

With COVID, we got to see this kind of bogus science fail in real-time, but with global warming, we just get to see new predictions of doom fail every few years. Rather than hitting us with more PR campaigns featuring sad polar bears, maybe they should try getting back to real science. Start funding the skeptics. Open up scientific debate. Take politics out of the equation and allow people to go where their research leads them, not to predetermined answers. That’s what people who care about science would do. On the other hand, if it’s really all about “science” masquerading as a political agenda, nothing needs to change at all.