By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 06, 2014
President Obama entered office promising to restore the
sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics and
reason is being waged on behalf of politically correct politics.
After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to
convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he
focused on curtailing semi-automatic "assault" rifles. But there is
no statistical evidence that such guns -- semi-automatic rifles that have
mostly cosmetic changes to appear similar to banned military-style fully
automatic assault weapons -- lead to increased gun-related crimes.
The promiscuous availability of illegal handguns does.
They're used in the vast majority of all gun-related violent crime -- and in
such cases they are often obtained illegally. Yet the day-to-day enforcement of
existing handgun statutes is far more difficult than the widely publicized
passing of new laws.
Late-term abortions used to be justified in part by an
argument dating back to the 1970s that fetuses were not yet "human."
But emerging science has allowed premature babies 5 months old or younger to survive
outside the womb. Brain waves of fetuses can be monitored at just six weeks
after conception. Such facts may be unwelcome to many, given the political
controversy over abortion. Yet the idea that even small fetuses are not viable
humans until birth is simply unscientific.
The president still talks of "settled science"
in the global warming debate. He recently flew to California to attribute the
near-record drought there to human-induced global warming.
There is no scientific basis for the president's
assertion about the drought. Periodic droughts are characteristic of
California's climate, both in the distant past and over a century and a half of
modern record-keeping. If the president were empirical rather than deductive
and political, he would instead have cited the logical reasons why this drought
is far more serious than those of the late 1970s.
California has not built additional major mountain
storage reservoirs to capture Sierra Nevada runoff in decades. The population
of the state's water consumers has almost doubled since the last severe
drought. Several million acre-feet of stored fresh water have been in recent
years diverted to the sea -- on the dubious science that the endangered delta
smelt suffers mostly from irrigation-related water diversions rather than
pollutants, and that year-round river flows for salmon, from the mountains to
the sea, existed before the reserve water storage available from the
construction of mountain reservoirs.
The administration has delayed construction of the
proposed Keystone XL pipeline, citing concern about climate change. Yet a
recent State Department environmental report found that the proposed pipeline
would not increase carbon dioxide emissions enough to affect atmospheric
temperatures. There is no scientific basis from which to cancel the Keystone,
but a variety of logical reasons to build it -- such as moving toward North
American energy independence and protecting ourselves against energy
blackmailers and cartels abroad.
Science is rarely "settled." Instead, orthodoxy
is constantly challenged. A theory survives not by politics, but only if it can
offer the best logical explanations for a set of circumstances backed by hard
statistical data.
Global warming that begat "climate change" is
no exception. All the good politics in the world of blaming most bad weather on
too much carbon dioxide cannot make it true if unquestioned climate data cannot
support the notion of recent temperature increases being directly attributable
to rising man-caused carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
In recent years, "settled science" with regard
to the causes of peptic ulcers, the health benefits of Vitamin D, the need for
annual mammograms and the prognostic value of the prostate-specific antigen
test have all been turned upside down by dissident scientists offering new
theories to interpret fresh data.
Yet for the new anti-empirical left, science becomes an
ally only when refuting absurd religious theories that the earth is 5,000 years
old. Otherwise, it can prove irrelevant when it does not necessarily support
pet causes.
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