It’s not that scientists aren’t behaving like engineers. You don’t have be an engineer to not behave like third graders at the playground during recess. It definitely helps though! The big enabler is having any occupation in which you are held accountable for your mistakes. A pilot or a cab driver makes a mistake they can crash and die killing themselves and others. An electrician makes a mistake someone gets electrocuted or a house catches fire. A plumber makes a mistake and a house might get flooded. It’s like that. What happens when an academic at university makes a mistake? At most a mistake on one paper is corrected by another paper and no one but a few people in his peer group ever notices. The climate change brouhaha is all about these unaccountable academics creeping out of their unaccountable cloistered lecture halls and trying to dictate public policy with nothing but empty paper claims produced and reviewed in the usual unaccountable way to back them up. Unfortunately for them once they start doing things where the consequences of them being wrong might result in lost blood and treasure then engineers and others accustomed to scrutinizing claims with those kinds of consequences are saying it’s a huge pile of ideological bullsh!t atop a small and inconsequential secondary effect of fossil fuel consumption. The engineer does a cost-benefit analysis and finds no justification whatsoever for the suggested modifications in the manner in which fossil fuels are used to power and grow an infrastructure tasked with keeping 6 billion people housed and fed.
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