ON A clear day from my house I can see the Rangitoto Islands in Tasman Bay and, with binoculars, I note I am seeing only the top of islands.
My house is at a height — so Google Earth tells me — of 241m.
Looking in the same direction from Castlecliff Beach, the horizon is clear. I have seen the islands from my house many times but never from Castlecliff, so my evidence is probably correct. I conclude that the surface of the Earth curves.
I have experienced gravity in many places across the Earth and find that its direction is always down.
The opposite of down is up and if I look vertically upwards I find that different groups of stars pass directly overhead in different parts of the Earth. I put all this evidence together and conclude that the Earth is probably close to a sphere in shape.
A growing number of people say the Earth is flat and gravity does not exist. If their ideas are based on repeatable observations, I do not have a problem with this — indeed, if their evidence is better than mine I shall change my mind on the question.
In a nutshell, this is the scientific method. A theory is an idea that attempts to explain the available evidence. It is not simply an idea dreamed up out of nothing. A theory without evidence is make-believe and has no part in science.
Joel Clement had been a top climate policy scientist at the US Department of the Interior for seven years as of July 2017. His area of speciality was the effects of climate change on native communities in Alaska.
Before this work, Joel had worked on conservation science programmes in Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica and Madagascar. His lifelong focus had been bridging the gaps between science, policy and land management.
In June of 2017 he received an email telling him he had been reassigned to an accounting position that dealt with royalty payments from companies extracting coal and oil from public lands. The transfer was involuntary — he had loved and been good at his climate change work, but he had no qualifications or experience in accounting.
The reassignment was part of a major shakeup which transferred dozens of senior officials involuntarily into positions in which they had no experience or training. A month later Joel resigned.
Why was a dedicated and eminently able researcher removed from a position where he was achieving positive results and placed into a job which held no interest for him and in which he had no experience?
It is no secret that US President Donald Trump does not take the threat of human-caused climate change seriously. Almost a year ago he nominated Scott Pruitt to run the US Environmental Protection Agency — Pruitt having been a loud opponent of the climate policies of the Obama administration.
Trump also installed Rick Perry as secretary of the Department of Energy, an organisation that Perry had earlier sworn to shut down. Trump appointed keen trophy hunter Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior — the same Zinke who had recently presided over the removal of safeguards against mineral extraction and environmental damage over huge areas of public and ancestral lands in the National Monument Parks.
The link is clear. On August 17, Trump's administration released its first official memo on science and technology spending. This document prioritises spending (in declining importance) as national security and defence, economic prosperity, energy dominance and public health. It also describes basic research as critical but states that projects of greater uncertainty should give way to those that can be more readily developed into products and services.
Put simply, this says that weapons research gets top billing and turning a buck is more important than building knowledge or improving health.
This explains why Trump has yet to appoint a White House science adviser and is keen to appoint people to heads of government departments – especially in science and technology — who have neither the basic scientific education or understanding of evidence-based decisions required to usefully carry out the job. I await eagerly the appointment of a Flat Earther as head of Nasa.
If this was just more funnelling of US taxpayer money into the pockets of major defence industry owners, we may regard it as business as usual.
But it is much more serious than that. The scientific method means you cannot dismiss research findings because you do not like them or you feel uncomfortable because data corroborated by many different research methods say that your money-making scheme is causing the heat death of the Earth. But this is precisely what is happening.
Money buys votes and opinions and if the bought voters live on an Earth that was made in seven days 6000 years ago and know that scientists are the ones who use chemtrails to control the climate or make people sick to boost drug company profits, then dismissal of genuine data becomes routine.
Having established that gut reaction based upon implanted ideas is a better way of making decisions than using measurement and logic, the next step is further into the Orwellian nightmare with language control.
In a recent order, the Trump administration banned the use of certain words by Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Some are aimed at excluding certain people by banning words such as "transgender".
Of yet deeper importance is the banning of the words "evidence based" and "science based". Instead the recommended phrase is "CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes". This is polite speak for ignore the science if you do not like it.
What we are seeing is the endorsement of stupidity and ignorance. The stupidity of putting short-term financial profit ahead of slightly longer term survival and the ignorance that is necessary to allow this.
Frank Gibson
■ Frank Gibson is a semi-retired teacher of mathematics and physics who has lived in the Whanganui region since 1989.
