Fit the Facts to the Policy

In a logical world, governing bodies would create and enforce policy based on reality and facts, but in the real world, perception and biases highlight or emphasize only certain facts or phenomena to fit a worldview. It happens all the time, and is the very key to propaganda campaigns. But since the Enlightenment, Science has held the rubric that it's conclusions, principles, and laws are based solely on reality, anything less is speculation, hypothesis, or theory. But one thing Scientists could always agree on, is that the facts were the same, which is why reproduceable results in experimentation is part of the peer review process.

This is why I am dismayed, but not surprised, to learn from Climate Audit,that the 4th IPCC assessment has these backward procedures for recommending policy to international groups: "Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter." Executive summaries of findings are supposed to be edited for consistency with the findings, not the findings edited to fit the summary. Some of the comments point this out to be conspiracy by the 600 or so scientists working on the IPCC assessment, but others quickly suggest the correct term: charade.

On a side note, commenter Steve Sadlov introduces a term for envirobats that I should have seen before, since I've already made the connection of communism as the basis for almost all Green politics and activism. "Hard core Gaia worshippers and radical environmentalists are watermelons. Green on the outside and red on the inside." I say I should have seen that before because I came from a school with a large asian minority, so encountering eggs (white on the outside, yellow on the inside) or bananas/twinkies (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) in dating situations was quite common. But watermelon! That's awesome and a keeper!