OPINION:
Historically, biological reality included the existence of two immutable sexes, the humanity of a late-term fetus, and that childbirth was exclusive to one sex. Today, this reality is exchanged for trans-sex, blob-of-tissue and birthing-person fantasies.
Basic understanding of fundamental scientific truths has been thrown back to well before the Middle Ages. In fact, modernity has achieved an irrationality never before attained in history. Quite an accomplishment.
How did so many seemingly rational 21st-century people end up denying reality?
Part of the denial can be attributed to the strong influences of ideology and politics. Leftists who identify challenges to their beliefs as “science denial” simultaneously claim to “follow the science” and boldly broadcast “science is real.” Yet the “science” these leftists follow — including claims of trans-sex, blob-of-tissue and birthing-person reality — is not authentic science and rather brazenly proclaims that “biological science is not real.”
Leftist science appears to be just a cover for leftist ideology and politics.
Another explanation for the denial may lie in the fact that the marketplace of ideas has been flooded by concepts rooted in “post-normal science” — a kind of established practice that has been identified as akin to postmodern science.
Post-normal science, or PNS, assumes an advancement on the modern traditional way of knowing, which includes observing, hypothesizing, and testing a phenomenon.
PNS is put into play when both the stakes in societal decisions are high and problem uncertainties are high.
High-stakes, high-uncertainty situations saturate contemporary life. In addition to biological and medical challenges like COVID-19 and other viruses, an excellent example is the current and continuing angst over the future of our atmosphere. Consequently, climate change concerns fit the PNS playbook.
The exact impending doom proffered by conflicting climate models leaves the urgent decisions for operational solutions to protect society in the lurch.
Enter PNS to tender solutions that include expanding peer review of the climate change challenge to embrace not just climate subject-matter experts but any stakeholders that can sway decision-makers to their political point of view, whether left, right or (rarely) center.
Political activists can readily politicize science matters like our ever-changing climate because climate change — often conflated with catastrophic but typical weather events — is ripe for hyperbole. And beaucoup leftist persuasion is typically displayed at the U.N. climate change confabs like the one completed in December in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The international consortium of governmental elites and their like-minded minions gather every few years to reinvigorate their hold on ordained climate science. Yet challenges to science ordination have been embraced by contemporary practice ever since such challenges emerged in the 16th century and 17th centuries with Galileo and his ilk.
Such early postmedieval philosophers and emerging scientists, despite their technological handicaps, were focused on advancing knowledge and subsequently improving the human race’s lot in life, regardless of the imminent passe beliefs of the time. The modern view of a warming planet — caused in part by human activity — is posed as indisputably disastrous for the masses. The unfortunate solution by today’s aristocracy is to return human beings to premedieval living conditions.
So PNS has apparently not only disrupted the biological sciences resulting in confusion over obvious sex distinctions, but has also harassed the atmospheric sciences to the detriment of the comforts of modern life.
If we can no longer agree on facts like one unique sex plus another unique sex equals two unique sexes, then solutions to complex challenges such as climate change will likely continue to elude us. And a gender-confused, biology-denying populace will be prey to climate control fiat dictated by domineers who advocate post-normal science.
• Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
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