The science BS meter.

Over at WUWT someone made a comment:

NZ Willy February 21, 2016 at 10:18 am

This is just the climate equivalent of astronomy’s “dark matter”. The technique is, when evidence refutes your theory, don’t change the theory, but instead announce a new kind of phenomenon — previously unheard of and scientifically unmodelled — and nest it into your theory and proclaim that it makes your theory even stronger! My BS meter is broken now from overloading.

Agreed. Background radiation too flat? The universe suddenly inflated for no reason to flatten it out. Galaxies spin too fast? Must be dark matter. Universe receding too quickly? Must be dark energy. What are these things? How do they fit into the standard particle model (itself a massive parameter-fixing exercise)? No idea. But guess what! IT’S TRUE! There was inflation, there’s dark matter, dark energy! Aren’t cosmologists wonderful! /sarc

I was horrified when I discovered the anti-science, ratbaggery and all-round dishonesty of the CAGW movement in 2008. But since then I have been wondering about the branches of science I love and admire, the ‘hard’ fundamental sciences. What about the Higgs boson? Predicted and searched for umpteen times until it was finally “found”. But think: what does a failed search mean? It was predicted to exist at a certain energy level and wasn’t there. That’s the failure of the theory (the “standard model”). It made a faulty prediction. Re-predicting at a higher energy is adjusting the parameters to fit the facts. And this went on a number of times. The inescapable conclusion from this is that the theory has enough free parameters to adjust to any experimental outcome. It isn’t science. None of this bodes well for us as a species maintaining our very best attributes in the face of obscurantism and opportunism.