If you have a hard time getting meaning from the written word, here's a lecture (mp3) from Dr. Richard Baer of Cornell University from 2003 that covers most of what I've written below. If you listen to this lecture before going on, your understanding of the issues I'm covering will be greatly improved. The writing below will be more a review than first read. Trust and Science.
I've written before of my reliance on the scientific method. When you think of science as Science, what does Science mean?
It is the body that represents all of our theories about the world.
And among those theories are different levels of reliance that can be made and taken. That is to say, some of the theories of Science are more reliable, some are less reliable. This is due in great measure to the limits of man. To simply utter the word "ontology" is to open volumes that have been written on the basic essentials that govern human thought. We cannot read, listen, think, write without feeling our emotional reaction that which we have read, heard, thought or written. But, emotions aside, as we deconstruct our observations of the world, we begin to construct our own personal ontology.
The range of reliability is exhibited by the forms we use to describe the elements of our ontology. Perhaps the best example of an ontological basis for truth is described by what we call the axioms of mathmatics. What's funny to me is the emotional interplay between words that tend to describe the same thing. For instance, what is the difference between an axiom and a postulate? It has a degree of difference emotionally, but none logically.
But you would rather I tell you a thing is "axiomatic" rather than my "postulate". Although both are inferentially the same, and have the same value to our ontological view. (For an interesting discussion of ontology, go to
this page at FormalOntology.it and scroll down to "DESCRIPTIVE, FORMAL AND FORMALIZED ONTOLOGY".)
There is more to this than I will write in this post. For an interesting look at postulates and axioms--and to lessen the innate impulse to equivocate between their definitions--I refer you to
this simple page from ScienceBlogs. (Scroll down to Peano arithmetic.)
What I haven't written of yet is perhaps the most important part, or attribute, of Science. For this let me refer you to "Ontology" posted
here. (Scroll down to the paragraph that starts with " Ontology is not a subjective ...".)
Before you begin reading my next paragraph, let me point out that the writers referred to in the paragraph above begin to describe ontology by "what it isn't". (For a fuller description of what is occuring here, in the form of analytical reduction, scroll down to "Prevailing Views" in
this article from Senses.info. In the third paragraph from this sub-title is the expression, "...that the failure of such reduction leads necessarily to reconsideration and ultimately revision of the construction, and not to supernatural conclusions." This is an enormously important point lost in many conjectures about Science. It is not my point to re-examine the failure of Berkeley to adequately describe the World. Just to simply point out that if we continue to use the tools of reduction within the framework of a strict ontology, that our relationship to the divine will be enhanced instead of weakened.)
Which allows me to now posit what I believe are the two biggest scientific scandals of the last twenty years. The first is Man Made Global Warming. The second is Creation Science. Both are scandalous because they presume to prove a thing with failed construction. That is, their reliance upon things that are unknowable, unobservable and unprovable.
Or, that their "science" tends to fall apart under the examination of their
epistemological core. And unfortunately, that, in the case of NASA, and specifically those who work with James Hansen at the Goddard Space Flight Center, are deliberately
misleading in their presentation of global temperature data.
Deliberately misleading. In our common experience, there are other ways of saying this. As I stated at the beginning of this post there "are different levels of reliance that can be made and taken." Most of these differences are known, stated, assumed. A lot of work with String Theory is challenging a lot of the axioms and postulates of math. Because in Science we work to improve our understanding of our observations of the world we live in.
That anyone that would call oneself a scientist would manipulate the data is the type of fraud that would result in any graduate student being removed from his program of study. That Dr. Hansen already has received his degree, I suppose, removes this penalty.
I suppose being exposed as a fraud is penalty enough. The data from GISS is simply incoherent.
