Trump's War on Science

Will Trump Lose The War On Science?

Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013

Ever since the announcement of the new President of the United States, I knew science would be under threat. After all, we live in a society where the most powerful office in the world uses the term "alternative facts" as opposed to addressing idiotic behaviour. I didn't realise how fast science would be under threat in terms of global warming. For those of you who somehow don't know; a few days after becoming POTUS Donald Trump removed any mention of climate change from the white house website and correspondence and tried to do the same to the Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, EPA was forced to freeze grants and cease on contracts issued to study environmental problems. Sadly, many people lost their PhD’s, jobs, research and livelihoods to this ridiculous act. They went even further with this and said any studies to come out of the EPA would have to be cleared by white house officials before being released to the public. The Department of Agriculture also got similar screening treatment with their press releases. Effectively censoring scientific information. This insufferable man has officially gone to war with science – he is trying to deny and silence well established science – simply because he cannot change it and this is why he will lose.

"It's a Scam and a Hoax"

I've personally been told this, when asked I never got a response. I suppose I know why, because it is an easy outlet when you don't understand anything, just say the first thing that pops into your head and have no defence when questioned about it. Let me tell you who's scamming you. No one. Every major science organisation, including independent research scholars have all scamming us? Scientists have run independent tests and manipulated the data to come to the same conclusions? That's pretty strange, almost statistically impossible, to be quite frank. But you give an overhwelming argument and you have converted me. Oh wait, no. No you haven't. You lack two fundamental things for this pseudoscientific bullshit; evidence and critical reasoning.

Here is the current climate model released by NAS (National Academy of Sciences) you can disagree with it all you want, but you're wrong- as it is evident there is a clear overall trend as years progress. This is pooled data from independent researchers, peer reviewed, critically scientifically analysed and published for scientific scrutiny - of which it has received little scrutiny from actual scientists. Again, there's a completely overwhelming amount of data on the NASA website from global mapping temperatures. Also you can view all the raw data and graphs here.

I could literally be here all day listing papers, cohorts, reviews and data sets I guess my point is that the Trump administration know dick about science or scientific processes to come to the conclusion that you are being 'scammed' without presenting any valid evidence (because there isn't any). Climate change is real, the fact they choose not to believe that in the face of overwhelming evidence makes them a conspiracy theorist. I and if you are reading this and you believe in Donald Trump and what he "stands for" in this regard, I sincerely doubt you will click any of those links to actually look at the data because it completely disagrees with your preconceived view that all scientists/media/liberals are [insert whatever you like here] must be lying to "scam" you. 

You can literally see in the above graph the actual figures here - if you cannot get that the temperatures are rapidly rising from that then you are an abolute moron.

2016 hottest year

Officially, 2016 has been the hottest year on record since the tracking of global temperatures in 1880, meaning that for the third year, the global temperatures have continued to rise to be the highest on record. It is dumbfoundly, crucially undeniable that the earth is getting hotter and hotter. Scientists work extremely hard to calculate all this data, it’s not as though there is just a thermometer plugged into the ground and hey presto, we have another degree Celsius on the scale. No, it is much, much more complicated than that and with that complication comes a lot of peer review and data assessment – independently. This means that the data is independently, rigorously tested by different scientists, in different locations – not just sat in the same office looking at the same numbers whilst rubbing their hands together and thinking how much money they can make from fearmongering. You, like Mr Trump, could deny the fact that the data is accurately obtained and calculated, you would be wrong, but you could. Then there comes the question of why? Is it man made? The world’s scientific consensus is that the upward trend in the temperature is due to the man-made release of CO2 gas. You can then, as trump does, point to the few ‘scientists’ who disagree with this view.

Any other areas where fingers have been pointed have been debunked by scientific studies. You could just wave your hands around and say things like ‘Climate change is a hoax from china’ and dismiss all the actual evidence – and researchers are just perpetrating this to get funding, because all that funding goes in their pocket *eye roll*. There are a myriad of environmental scientists, the plausibility of them all being bought off is beyond ridiculous. Think about it. Really, think.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

 Dickhead.

What’s Next?

In the face of everything covered by Trumps administration in the last week it is clear that science is under threat. But is trump picking a fight he will lose? Science doesn’t care. It doesn’t read, it doesn’t give a damn about what you think or what you do. Sea levels will continue to rise, vaccines will continue to work and he will continue to be a complete dickhead. The science is correct, whether it is censored or not – having the scientifically illiterate censor the media that comes out of the EPA and climate change research just holds back the progression of mankind – which is pretty much a fitting tribute to this whole trump presidency. Scientists are fighting back and winning and I can only hope that our own prime minister and other officials will stand up against this absolute ridiculous man’s ideology. That however remains to be seen with any of the disgusting acts he has carried out during his campaign and his actual presidency. Vaccines will be under attack by this uneducated moron soon enough.

President Trump can just get in the fucking bin.

Should science fall to start anew?

How colonialistic is science?

This week I was pointed into the direction of a Youtube video entitled ‘science must fall’. Here we go I thought, Anti-vax, Anti-GMO and probably anti-thinking. I will warn you, If you want to watch the video, it will take 4 minutes of your time (more if you have to pause it to put your head in your hands so as not to scream, much like myself. There is also the two hour video. Your choice). Alas, it wasn’t anti GMO or anti vaccination or anti-climate change it was just plain anti-science. ‘Fallists’ met to give a talk on how we should ‘decolonise science’. No, this is not satire please keep reading. 

The point of the discussion that was clearly been put across by the speaker is that science is a western thing, created and pushed onto African people. Effectively, science is a religion that has been shoved down their throats. Now, there are people here in the western civilisations who claim this to be true, we call them ‘morons’. This woman said (or something to this effect):

‘Wipe away science and start with a blank slate. We can make our own knowledge’

They bang on about ‘black magic’ and how they can get lightening to strike down their enemies. Newton’s apple made him write ‘some equations’ and then that was forced upon the world. You can hear some heckles and much relieving laughter from the audience. Although when someone claimed the lightening summoning wasn’t true, the moderator said he had ‘violated their ‘safe’ space and made him apologise. Nothing like standing up for what you believe in, eh? He shouldn’t go outside when there is a thunderstorm, he’s clearly not safe. 

No, Science isn’t imposed

Science, as much as they deny this, is a fundamental truth. Gravity, as discovered by Newton, didn’t just appear in the western civilization circa 1687 and then get forced onto the rest of the world. That is insane on the face of it. To make that even more absurd, they want to sustain a culture whereby science is totally eradicated and principle foundations are ignored in order to come up with their own truths about the universe. The objective of science is to seek out the truth, no matter who you are, weather you’re a king, African, British, Russian, or a plague ridden peasant, the fundamentals of science are true.

A transcultural atmosphere around science is imperative to its function. We make hypotheses, test them, publish the results – that’s not really science. We replicate the studies, other labs use them, and other countries replicate and reproduce. Then we have science, we have communication, confirmation (or not) that something is on the right track. Science, for all intended purposes, needs to be freely administered to other countries in order for it to be effective. 

However, with that said, it isn’t perfect. Science is undermined constantly, for example, in that video. Science is undermined when it is twisted in order to factualise religion or pseudoscience. But enrolling science out to other countries is not colonialism.

How to science wrong

As I said, she stated that Sir Isaac Newton published a paper and that was it. What was once free-floating around in Africa suddenly came crashing down. As science moves on in decades, we see that the theory of gravity has been questioned, tested and was challenged by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

“Newton saw that apple falling and then out of nowhere gravity existed”

 But that doesn’t matter, because gravity is real whether or not you think it is. This is then moved on to by arguing that science ‘does not belong to humanity’ claiming that scientists in Africa would have come up with a different answer. That, is science. Things are looked at in multiple ways, take medicine for example. We have antibiotics and some doctors not wanting to prescribe them for resistance reasons and some doctors prescribing them for anything. We have new drugs being developed and doctors choosing to use them for things other than their intended use because the side effects may be a benefit to the patient. The only way doctors know of these is through the knowledge passed through the scientific community. People come up with different answers all the time, yeah, some are wrong. But what these scientific communities are doing is building upon the knowledge that took years to get, to further the scientific advancements in the world. They are not sat around discussing if gravity is real or not. It is very clear here that what they want is science to back up and give substance to cultural beliefs – ignorance that cannot and should not be tolerated in this day and age.

The speaker, before stating that ‘gravity existed out of nowhere’ states that she had a scientific education. This hugely remains to be seen. I have no idea where she got thus ‘education’ but I would seriously like to chat with her tutors. 

‘If you disagree with this thinking, then you need to go back and decolonise your mind’

As a scientist and a science enthusiast when I was growing up I spent my time reading science books, watching science videos, learning science and ultimately studying science at degree level. Not too shockingly, that means I have read about Newton’s laws of gravity and the Theory of Relativity. As a skeptic, I have read the studies, challenges and disputes that has come along with those theories and have decided for myself, as with other scientists, that these are fundamental truths of the universe. That is not colonialism. That’s information and critical thinking. I encourage her to have a crack at it.

Conclusion

Science is science. It doesn’t care on your directionality. West or eastern, gravity is fundamentally true because it has been studied, not just because somebody said it is true. Science is about transparency, what on earth would starting out new and wiping the slate clean do? Rejecting science and using it to fit what you believe is detrimental to systems; governments, healthcare and education.

 

If science doesn’t fit your worldview, you don’t just simply ignore it, or in this case; try to literally wipe it from eastern civilisation. Tad extreme.