May 18, 2021

A whole social order is going off the rails by not knowing what science is. Getting it wrong is allowing fake science and technology to destroy environments, economies and energy systems.

The general assumption is that science is looking at unusual things. Anything more complex than eating with a fork and spoon is science to some persons. Getting that wrong became a disaster for human existence.

Science is not what scientists look at; it's a method of study. The method has the purpose of extending basic knowledge into unknown areas. Knowledge is abstract. That means it is not perceivable.

Abstract knowledge has to be created. It doesn't exist in nature; it is a human construct which allows humans to determine complex relationships.

So real scientists go through an unusual process to convert complexities into a form that can be managed by human minds. The demands are not easily met. The process involves more failures than successes.

Yet that process has been hijacked by persons who don't have a clue as to its existence. They imagine something exploitable and pretend that it is a fact of science. Carbon dioxide destroying the planet is an example.

Incompetent scientists imagined carbon dioxide heating the atmosphere about 150 years ago. Real scientists put them in there place until recent times. Recent social dynamics have allowed corruption to overtake rationality, as QAnon showed.

In the muddle, journalists replaced scientists in creating social assumptions about carbon dioxide. Journalists attribute any weather event and some unrelated events to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Real scientists used to try to correct them but got nowhere. Some got fired or shoved out of science. The incompetent corrupters were brought to the surface by the journalists who ran away with their motives and imaginations.

Engineers, technologists and medical doctors are not scientists. The usual assumption is that all of them study science, so it doesn't matter whether they are called scientists or not.

One of the things being missed is that studying science by those criteria is nothing resembling what real scientists do. Undergrads takes courses to study science that way. Graduate students in science step into a totally different universe. They have to educate themselves. No one can do it for them by giving them something to study.

The first thing graduate students in science have to do is prove that water is wet or something similar. No one can prove that water is wet. The same is true of all assumptions. No one can prove assumptions to be true. So scientists don't prove; they measure. Real science consists of measured evidence. The conclusions are in the application realm which have nothing to do with the universe that science is created in.

The difference between getting science right and getting it wrong is in the abstract realities where measurement replaces assumptions. Non-scientists are not doing anything similar. They have no possibility of getting their assumptions correct. There are too many possibilities, variations and complexities to get any of it right without measurement of objective realities.

Which means the journalists got none of it right in guessing what carbon dioxide does.