{"id":7090,"date":"2014-03-06T10:29:23","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T18:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7090"},"modified":"2014-03-06T10:29:23","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T18:29:23","slug":"the-anti-empirical-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-anti-empirical-left\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anti-Empirical Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Science is ignored when it doesn’t support politically correct policy.<\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics, and reason is being waged on behalf of politically\u00a0correct politics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he focused on curtailing semi-automatic \u201cassault\u201d rifles. But there is no statistical evidence that such guns \u2014 semi-automatic rifles that have mostly cosmetic changes to appear similar to banned military-style fully\u00a0automatic assault weapons \u2014 lead to increased gun-related crimes.<\/p>\n

The promiscuous availability of illegal handguns does. Handguns are used in the vast majority of all gun\u00a0related violent crime \u2014 and in such cases they are often obtained illegally. Yet the day-to-day enforcement of existing handgun statutes is far more difficult than the widely publicized passing of new laws.<\/p>\n

Late-term abortions used to be justified in part by an argument dating back to the 1970s that fetuses were not yet \u201chuman.\u201d But emerging science has allowed premature babies five months old or younger to survive outside the womb. Brain waves of fetuses can be monitored at just six weeks after conception. Such facts may be unwelcome to many, given the political controversy over abortion. Yet the idea that fetuses are not viable humans until birth is simply unscientific.<\/p>\n

The president still talks of \u201csettled science\u201d in the global-warming debate. He recently flew to California to attribute the near-record drought there to human-induced global warming.<\/p>\n

There is no scientific basis for the president\u2019s assertion about the drought. Periodic droughts are characteristic of California\u2019s climate, both in the distant past and over a century and a half of modern record-keeping. If the president were empirical rather than political, he would instead have cited the logical reasons for the fact that this drought is far more serious than those of the late 1970s.<\/p>\n

California has not built additional major mountain storage reservoirs to capture Sierra Nevada runoff in decades. The population of the state\u2019s water consumers has almost doubled since the last severe drought. Several million acre-feet of stored fresh water have been in recent years diverted to the sea \u2014 on the dubious science that the endangered delta smelt suffers mostly from irrigation-related water diversions rather than pollutants, and that year-round river flows for salmon, from the mountains to the sea, existed before the reserve water storage available from the construction of mountain reservoirs.<\/p>\n

The administration has delayed construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, citing concern about climate change. Yet a recent State Department environmental report found that the proposed pipeline would not increase carbon\u00a0dioxide emissions enough to affect atmospheric temperatures. There is no scientific basis from which to cancel the Keystone, but a variety of logical reasons to build it \u2014 such as moving toward North American energy independence and protecting ourselves against energy blackmailers and cartels abroad.<\/p>\n

Science is rarely \u201csettled.\u201d Instead, orthodoxy is constantly challenged. A theory survives not by politics, but only if it can offer the best logical explanations for a set of circumstances backed by hard statistical data.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlobal warming\u201d that begat \u201cclimate change\u201d is no exception. All the good politics in the world of blaming most bad weather on too much carbon dioxide cannot make it true if unquestioned climate data cannot support the notion of recent temperature increases\u2019 being directly attributable to rising man-caused carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

In recent years, \u201csettled science\u201d with regard to the causes of peptic ulcers, the health benefits of Vitamin D, the need for annual mammograms, and the prognostic value of the prostate-specific antigen test have all been turned upside down by dissident scientists offering new theories to interpret fresh data.<\/p>\n

Yet for the new anti-empirical Left, science becomes an ally only when refuting absurd religious theories that the Earth is 5,000 years old. Otherwise, it can prove irrelevant when it does not support pet causes.<\/p>\n

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.<\/em>\u00a0His latest book is<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span><\/em>,\u00a0published this spring by<\/em>\u00a0Bloomsbury Books.<\/em>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science is ignored when it doesn’t support politically correct policy. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics, and reason is being waged on behalf of politically\u00a0correct politics. After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[603,354],"tags":[217,1014,291,35,1069,479,1073],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Qm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":68,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-between-the-amendments\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":0},"title":"The War Between the Amendments","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The horrific Newtown, Conn., mass shooting has unleashed a frenzy to pass new gun-control legislation. But the war over restricting firearms is not just between liberals and conservatives; it also pits the first two amendments to the US Constitution against each other. Apparently,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5822,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-psychodramas\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Psychodramas","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events \u2014 and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":125,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-great-new-year-stampede\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":2},"title":"The Great New Year Stampede","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services There is a new-year stampede developing that we have not seen for a long time. Gun stores are swamped with panicking customers. They are looking for handguns, semi-automatic rifles and as much ammunition as they can afford. But buyers are not just camouflaged\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5887,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-dangers-of-politically-inspired-moral-outrage-from-sandy-hook-to-what-next\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":3},"title":"The Dangers of Politically Inspired Moral Outrage–From Sandy Hook to What Next?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner It is a bad idea to demonize your opponents with epithets such \u201cshameful\u201d and \u201clying,\u201d given that the case was not made that proposed gun-control legislation would have prevented a Sandy Hook. To prevent these school-shooting horrors might require either armed guards in schools,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Human Rights"","block_context":{"text":"Human Rights","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/human-rights\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5900,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-psychodramas-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":4},"title":"Obama’s Psychodramas","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events \u2014 and in ways usually illogical and incoherent.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Immigration"","block_context":{"text":"Immigration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/immigration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":34,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-age-of-tokenism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7090,"position":5},"title":"The Age of Tokenism","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is a depressing characteristic of government today to loudly enact legislation and impose regulations of little utility, while neglecting to address the root causes of truly serious problems. 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