Like his claim about the people he is attacking, it felt like his arguments were a little empty. He certainly had some facts about the actual movement of malaria, but most of the piece was dedicated to attacking specific climate-change proponents on one small issue. He even went as far as to claim that everything Dr. Epstein and co. published is a myth with the only evidence being one article on which the author is now correcting.
In truth, the science is never in. We’re not pollsters or policy-makers. We proceed by question, observation, hypothesis, and testing by experiment. We are still re-testing Einstein’s theory of relativity! So I’m happy to be a sceptic. That is how science works.
I think if you were to go out and try to claim that relativity wasn't true and still needed to be tested you wouldn't get much attention from the rest of the scientific community. Science is about finding evidence that verifies or falsifies a claim, but once that has been done multiple times (as it has with relativity) people find that it is much easier to just accept is as true until they find evidence to contradict it. I think it is a bad comparison.
He even went as far as to claim that everything Dr. Epstein and co. published is a myth with the only evidence being one article on which the author is now correcting.
No he didn't. He claimed that Epstein publishes primarily opinion pieces in scientific journals, which are then cited by activists as if they are actual research.
> I imagine he focuses on the actual movement of malaria because he is a medical entomologist and didn't want to make claims he was uncertain of
Which didn't stop him from making claims that his nomination to the IPCC would have been blocked by other countries and insinuating that some conspiracy caused his nomination to be mysteriously lost. Honestly, I was a lot more sympathetic to his arguments until I got to that part of the article.
"I think if you were to go out and try to claim that relativity wasn't true and still needed to be tested you wouldn't get much attention from the rest of the scientific community."
In fact, the opposite. Challenges to relativity not only get attention from the scientific community, they are _encouraged and funded_ - the community would be beside itself in glee (and someone would probably pick up a Serious Cred) if someone could disprove elements of relativity.
The challenge, of course, is coming up with new and interesting ways to disprove relativity.
Science is constantly testing ideas, but until we get contrary evidence we tend to go with the model that fits the data. Right now we still haven't figured out why galaxies are accelerating faster than they should and we are actively exploring that, but there are plenty of phenomena that GR explains very well. You can't go around claiming that GR simply doesn't exist because the data is there, but you could argue that it needs revisions.
Climate change seems to still be a very binary argument. There are some people arguing about how much is man made, but there are still those arguing about whether it exists at all.
I think in that way it doesn't make a good comparison.
The findings of classical mechanics have also been verified multiple times, before being contradicted by the findings of relativistic physics. It's a pivotal part of science to remain skeptic and continuously challenge the status quo.
He certainly had some facts about the actual movement of malaria, but most of the piece was dedicated to attacking specific climate-change proponents on one small issue.
In truth, the science is never in. We’re not pollsters or policy-makers. We proceed by question, observation, hypothesis, and testing by experiment. We are still re-testing Einstein’s theory of relativity! So I’m happy to be a sceptic. That is how science works.
I think if you were to go out and try to claim that relativity wasn't true and still needed to be tested you wouldn't get much attention from the rest of the scientific community. Science is about finding evidence that verifies or falsifies a claim, but once that has been done multiple times (as it has with relativity) people find that it is much easier to just accept is as true until they find evidence to contradict it. I think it is a bad comparison.