There are no doubt numerous examples both where reigning scientific theories of the day had been wrong, and where scientists were misled by bias. These biases continue today.
There are no doubt numerous examples both where reigning scientific theories of the day had been wrong, and where scientists were misled by bias. These biases continue today. And it is important to note, Lola, that in science, there is no 'truth', only theories that are the best ways to explain things.
But here is where we need to be modest in climate change skepticism: the global warming theory is a very strong theory that is held up by thousands upon thousands of inter-related hypotheses from different fields of science, from paleontology to atmospheric science to chemistry to physics and biology. To claim conspiracies of political bias just doesn't hold.
I know you disagree with me on this item. You gave two examples where science 'proved to be wrong' in the past. One example you cited was coffee. You said, "I still don't know whether a cup of coffee is good for me or not." Your other example was about an artificial reef in Florida made of tires. Although the tires were dumped in the 1970's, by this decade we have learned that the tires have created a scourge of environmental problems.
These are poor examples and are irrelevant to your charge that science is often mistaken. The study of coffee's affect on the human body, for example, is wildly untestable. Our own life is our most precious asset, and surely we seek to know definitively the cumulative effect of every substance, and what its consumption will do to us in the long run. But the science of nutrition and all of the complexities of human health, will always be an elusive question. Backed by one of the largest industries in the world, research into the health benefits of coffee is subjective at best.
The same cannot be said of basic sciences, where science can paint a clear picture and provide firm evidence and explanations. Your second example is even more off-point. The decision to throw tires into the ocean did not come from marine biologists, but from a tire company, a well-intentioned community, and an engineer. Furthermore, in the 1970's, the science of corals was highly speculative and there were few coral biologists. The tire disaster, then, was not a failure of science but of community activism.
I would rather want to learn from you of an example of a major failure in modern science, where a theory as strong as that of climate change was found to be false. I would be interested to find where such a modern failure in science was caused by a massive international bias, or conspiracy.
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