Opinion Is Not Science!

Opinion

I support the concept that every person has a right to their own ‘Opinions’, but I wonder if people remember that Opinion is not Science.

There is a long history of “Opinion” based viewpoints being used to condemn new science and then being prove by time and real science to be fully completely FALSE.

–> Pythagoras understood that the world was most likely round in 330 BC, the world’s Opinion makers continued to preach the utterly wrong counter-view until 1492.

–> In 1543 Copernicus proposed that the Sun was the likely centre around which the Earth and planets revolved, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake just a few years later for daring to speak such hearsay, Galileo was sentenced to life time house arrest… yet in the end, all churchy opinions aside, the Earth is not the centre of the Solar system.

–> Darwin published his brilliant breakthroughs in “Natural Selection” in 1838, after 8 years of withholding publication for fear of political/religious reprisals. People were outraged, public “opinion” had the numbers… but science seldom yields to democratic process… and in the end we now know that Darwin was correct.

–> In the 1850s, Louis Pasteur lost three of five children to infectious disease, driven by this great tragedy Pasteur came up with germ theory. His ideas were met with great resistance and violent protest from the worlds established medical world. We can only speculate to how many lives were lost while the ‘majority “Opinion” ‘ of medical science was temporarily held sway over fact.

–> Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that stomach Ulcers, long believed to be more of a mental health problem were in fact caused by the bacteria H. Pylori. The worlds medical “Opinion” was complete disregard, Marshall eventually dosed himself with the bacteria in a move that is widely recognized as somewhat reckless piece of experimental science, but it did lead directly to solid proof of the theory, in 2005, twenty years after the fact the science community let go of it’s hurt feelings and finally awarded Marshall and Warren the Nobel price such brilliant work deserves.

–> We could keep going here, but the point I wanted to make is that science is not democracy, and it does not matter how many people share an “Opinion”, and history has shown that when masses of people get all worked up by an Opinion… they often get to live with the embarrassment of the absolute nature of their wrong opinions.

What we do know about climate change is that not all voices in Academia are being heard.

I’m a huge fan of Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Pasteur, and Marshall and Warren. They stood true to their calling and eventually their detractors were proven to be buffoons and crack-pots.

The tide of public “Opinion” is currently giving many the strong sense of righteousness that some people so much crave, but it is important to remember that theory is not fact, and opinion may be everyone’s legal right, but it has no bearing on truth.

History has seen such strong public engagement and opinion in the past, and even when the numbers were overwhelming, in the end facts prevailed and all that the protesting opinions were left with was humiliation.

In the interest of preserving some manner of self pride I believe I’ll continue to fight censorship, and I’ll form an opinion on climate change when “all” of the facts are on the table, and when we are not relying on computer modeling as if it was some form of magic tool of truth.

Just Say’n

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