Divemedic has a must-read post about what science is and is not. Quite frankly, it is a brital - and much needed - takedown of "Trust the Science". I won't excerpt any of it because you need to read the whole thing, but he includes example after example of "Settled Science" which resulted in horrifying tragedy. Some of these won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for crying out loud.
Yes, he also talks about COVID without belaboring it.
However, in his excellent discussion about science as a process, he does not (much) delve into what happens to that process when it gets corrupted by moneyed interests. ClimateGate was perhaps the gold standard of that, explained spectacularly by Dr. Richard Muller from UC Berkeley's Earth Sciences Department.
There are two things to point out here: Dr. Muller is not one of those beastly Science Deniers like your humble host, be is a professional climate scientist and the driving force behind a climate database that is less corrupt than the others - the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature series.
The second thing to point out is the guy at the center of the ClimateGate scandal - and the scientist who Muller will no longer read papers published by him - was one of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Assessment Reports. These are supposedly the gold standard science, and it is entirely corrupt.
Scientist Hal Lewis explained why the establishment keeps doing this in his spectacular resignation from the American Physical Society (basically the professional association of Sheldon Coopers):
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise.Emphasis from me.
There is a reason that I have post tags for junk science and climate bullshit. There's a reason that there are dozens or hundreds of posts tagged with those. The science was bought and paid for, just like Divemedic's nutrition science example.
It's ironic that what is finally killing Global Warming is the manic push for AI datacenters. The big money is on to chasing a better graft.
