Political Science - I Understand It Now

In today's The Australian there is a piece by Robert Manne. Mr. Manne is a Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. His specialty is political science.

Watching how politics works over the years I often wondered at the combination these two terms since politics seems to be mostly a combination of pseudo sciences like psychology and sociology and lighter disciplines like economics and finance. Certainly containing no real science like we find in physics, geology, chemistry and astronomy all of which we find in Pliner's book.

Politics for many people is the art of lying while sounding reasonable. Prof. Manne refers to the "tens of thousands of climate scientists" who "regard it as now beyond doubt that, through the release of carbon dioxide and other green house gases, human-beings have been responsible for post-industrial global warming."

Firstly what are their names? Indeed name 100 of them. Ignoring that science is not a matter of consensus you can certainly looks up the names and certifications of many tens of thousands of scientists who have the opposite opinion, there is a web site for this. Manne generically describes this group (and covers many others) as "a few dozen scientists who are best described as global warming pseudo-skeptics." Included in this groups would be many previously lead authors on the IPCC reports and many scientists recognized as leaders in their fields. For a good list of such experts read the book "The Deniers" by Lawrence Solomon.

The rest of the article contains a number of many other factual errors like using the word "unequivocal" when describing the IPCCs summaries, produced by not a single scientists by the way, when if you actually read them they do not use such definite terms.

The whole article is essentially a set of lies carefully constructed to present the absolute truth while putting down or marginalizing the target. This then must be the definition of political science. The study of the art of being able to declare something completely false as being true with conviction while at the same time denigrating the opposition.

Note that the definition above did not contain the words "known to be false" Pliner's book, the target of the diatribe, has just been released. It is large, complex and would take an intelligent person a few days to read and many weeks to check the references. I could be wrong but like others who have been caught out I doubt that Prof Manne has done anything other than skim the summary passages.

This kind of political science, i.e. where science is politicized and in this case ignored, needs to be challenged loudly and often.