Victor Davis Hanson:
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. Handguns are 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 five 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 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 political, he would instead have cited the logical reasons for the fact that 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.
Democrats plan all-night ‘talkathon’ on climate change
Expect massive amounts of hot air, gasses and the expulsion of toxic fumes which will contaminate, (but is not likely to reduce,) the vast Democrat ozone layer that hovers over them.
Even truths like in this graph:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/afghanistan_withdrawal.png
Showing that if the reductions are carried out as planned, the United States would still have far more troops in Afghanistan than it did when Obama came into office and more than at any point during former president George W. Bush’s administration is under threat.
(The writer has since been terminated from ThinkProgress after a shower of furious White House calls.)
Other truths, like how many have died under Bush vs under Obama are never reported:
630 dead Americans under Bush.
1,685 dead Americans under Obama.
Carbon, absolutely necessary for both animal and plant life is being demonized by Obama for no good scientific reason.
Getting food stamps is made to appear noble.
Working one’s way up the ladder is penalized: the bottom 2 rungs (above free ObamaCare) pay the lion’s share for those not paying.
If I could, I would ask the physical scientists who dominate the Democrat caucus to cite one testable hypothesis that links human activity to climate; no models, no demonization of opponents, none of the anti-scientific claptrap about AGW being “settled.”
My bad. It appears there are few if any scientists in the Demo ranks who are about to bloviate in an area beyond their level of comprehension.
Hey Harry…explain the Carboniferous.
@inMAGICn:
It likely wouldn’t matter. The “science” is fraught with so many scandals and activism, that though any testable hypothesis they might supply would be entirely suspect, the activist infrastructure of academic science would unthinkingly support it.