Inexact Science: Liberals' words reveal their ignorance

by: daniel clark | published: 03 29, 2011

If there's ever a time that liberals are more dishonest than when they claim to defend the Constitution, it's when they pose as the embodiment of scientific integrity. Because they accuse their conservative opponents of "fearing science," liberals presume the unconditional endorsement of a fictitious character they call "science" for anything they say. Perhaps because of this self-assuredness, they feel no responsibility to be precise in their terminology, as they would if they truly held science in such high esteem.

The most recent example of this has come in response to Republican efforts to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Henry Waxman of California denounced the notion as "anti-science," and "a know-nothing, do-nothing approach," as if science had dictated that quasi-legislative powers be given to the unaccountable wonks at the EPA.

Waxman's fellow Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts satirically sniffed, "I'm worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room." If he and his colleagues really had been sent floating, it wouldn't have been from a lack of gravity, but from the fact that their noggins are filled with gaseous liberal pretension.

Though liberals habitually presume to speak for science, they often do so in the most imprecise terms. For example, they talk about "climate change" as if "the climate" encompassed the entire world, sometimes even calling it the "global climate." Yet "climate" is a regional characteristic. There is no single climate, for example, that includes both the Himalayas and the Australian Outback. The concept of "climate" as a global entity eviscerates the word of all meaning. There cannot be a global climate any more than there can be a global altitude, but don't bother the representatives of science with minor details like that.

Global warming alarmists talk about the need to reduce one's "carbon footprint." They also trade in "carbon credits" so that they may declare themselves to be "carbon neutral." It's as if they don't perceive any difference between the element, carbon, and the compound, carbon dioxide. Any scientist who considered the words "hydrogen" and "water" to be interchangeable would be a laboratory explosion waiting to happen. The liberals' "carbon" confusion is every bit as scientifically ignorant.

Another issue about which liberals cast their opponents as "anti-science" is destructive embryonic research. In order to make the killing of human embryos more palatable, they've devised the term "pre-embryo," to suggest that there's a point after fertilization at which a new entity exists, which is somehow either not alive or not human. It's a completely unscientific designation, given that an embryo comes into existence at the instant of fertilization. There is no time beforehand during which such thing as a "pre-embryo" might exist.

In their promotion of human cloning for the purpose of stem cell research, the liberal voices of science have drawn a distinction between "reproductive cloning," which would result in a cloned embryo being implanted for the purpose of being born, and "therapeutic cloning," which requires the killing and dissection of the cloned embryo for experimentation. This semantic evasion is inaccurate on both counts.

Cloning is a reproductive process by definition. An embryo can no more be non-reproductively cloned than it can be non-reproductively conceived in the womb. Moreover, cloning for the purpose of stem cell extraction cannot accurately be called "therapeutic" until it yields a cure or treatment for some disease or injury.

There is considerable disagreement among biologists about just what constitutes a species, but even with that caveat, most liberal pronouncements about endangered species are unsupportable. When they wrote the Endangered Species Act in 1973, they defined "species" as "any subspecies" or "any distinct population segment of any species." How can a classification be a subclassification of itself? That's like saying that a cup, a pint, a quart and a half gallon are each equal to a gallon.

So unaccustomed are liberals to being held accountable for their allegedly scientific pronouncements, they could tell us that E = MC Hammer, and still expect to be treated as the intellectual descendants of Albert Einstein. Congressman Markey doesn't have to worry about Republicans repealing the law of gravity, but he shouldn't put it past the self-described scientific experts in his own party to pass a gravity tax, only to later reveal that they'd meant to tax gravy instead.

Well, why not? It's only a matter of two letters. It's really no more significant than the difference between C and CO2.

-- Daniel Clark is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a web publication called The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press, where he also publishes a seasonal sports digest as The College Football Czar.

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