“I could work my way through 49 years of observing sleep disturbances and deprivation, but that is more than the scope of this letter. I am writing because I have witnessed Town of Falmouth officials and members of other boards trivialize symptom reports from people who are stalwart residents of the Town of Falmouth…. Furthermore, all the Wind I neighbors I have examined are passionate about the need for sustainable energy in an effort to reduce fossil fuel dependence.”
The human nervous system is the most sensitive instrument available to date for evaluating the impact of the Falmouth wind turbines on residents who live close to them. The ONLY experts in the discussion are the people who are sensing the sound, vibrations, pressure waves, etc. emitted by the turbines. There is no one more “expert “than these people.…
Continue Reading“’Unaccountable statistics’ [are] statistical goulash that sounds tangy and sophisticated but is actually bereft of substance, and used to make predictions that are almost never accounted for. Any number of ‘scientific’ renewable energy reports, from NREL to Stanford to MIT, are of this kind.”
Kent Hawkins’s post yesterday, “Science, Advocacy, and Public Policy,” defends the scientific method against both political correctness and the misuses of the method, often by people who claim to be scientists. This is a major issue in the current energy and climate debate where exaggeration and bias go hand-in-hand. I wish to add support to Hawkins’s theses in light of some of science’s nuanced complexity.
Scientific Inquiry
Here’s how a few mainly twentieth century scientists defined the purpose of scientific inquiry:
… Continue Reading“Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.”–Richard
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in high respect, as we should, we must be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific elite.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961
How should scientific reports be valued as input to public policy formulation? The beginning point must define advocacy and science from a considerable range of definitions as starting points.
Advocacy: active support or public recommendation of a cause.
– Collins English Dictionary (combining the terms advocate and advocacy)
… Continue ReadingScience: the investigation of natural phenomena through observation, theoretical explanation, and experimentation, or the knowledge produced by such investigation. Science makes use of the scientific method, which includes the careful observation of natural phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis, the conducting of one or more experiments to test the hypothesis, and the drawing of a conclusion that confirms or modifies the hypothesis.