“The current “science” of climate is that of a scholar steeped in science… and politics – with a dominant political gene.”
On a personal note, this quote brought to mind happenings in the field of renal transplantation. In the 1980’s. At the time, I was a practicing nephrologist. A study was published in which the observation was made that African-Americans seemed to receive fewer renal transplants than did Caucasians. There was conjecture as to why this was occurring and further scientific inquiry was planned. The then Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, saw a political opportunity in presuming this was due to discrimination and ran with it. Those of us practicing found this ludicrous since we were sophisticated enough to know that organs were allocated based on immunologic matching akin to blood typing only much more complicated. Nonetheless,
the ” politics” of the issue resulted in an investigation into how New York hospitals allocated kidneys and, of course, this spawned the enactment of new regulation- a big kerfuffle and a lot of positive publicity for Cuomo as a fighter against discrimination. Years later, the scientific community published its findings:
1) It was found that at a rather ” deep” immunologic level African-Americans were different than Caucasians. This was how God made them. The result was that it was slightly more difficult to find a Caucasian kidney that would match an African-American recipient and vice versa.
2) For cultural reasons, African-Americans donated fewer kidneys than did Caucasians. This led to a preponderance of ” white kidneys” in the system at any given time. Said kidneys, as noted above, had lower chance of being compatible with African-American patients in need of a transplant. Hence, African-Americans were receiving fewer renal allografts.
3) There was no willful racial discrimination operant.
The mix of science and politics can lead to presumptuous erroneous conclusions and remedies, especially when there is a ” dominant political gene” and gain to be enjoyed in their propagation.
1suburbandad