When an organization lustily fornicates along an upward trajectory it helps to just stop the action. You can then sit down quietly, and figure out just how the phlegmatic hairball got lodged inside the pretty kitty. We sometimes politely refer to these events as learning experiences. It stings less to speak in these terms. To paraphrase Former President Bill Clinton, it helps “put a little ice on that.” Luckily for “tourist expedition ship Akademic Shokalskiy,” finding the ice won’t be a problem.

You see, “tourist expedition ship” is the Newspeak Cant for Global Warming scientific expedition that exposed its rectal orifice to frigid, sub-zero temperatures. The Akademic Shokalskiy ventured forth to show the world that there just wasn’t enough ice around Antarctica during the Austral Summer. This would demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Earth had a fever. We then, yea verily would have to put up with self-congratulatory lectures from the mighty Nobel prize winners like Al Gore or Michael Mann.*

Then reality intruded when the Akademic Shokalskiy got stuck in the imaginary ice.** China’s Xue Long attempted to be neighborly and pull the benighted Climate Scientologists out of the ice which the IPCC proved could not possibly exist in an atmosphere with rising CO2 levels. Xue Long got bogged-down amidst the torpor of steaming climate change and won’t be going any further south this summer without a friendly assist.

Like almost all Climate Change schemes, the ultimate end state involves Captain America getting stuck with the bill.

As one of the world’s most powerful icebreakers heads south from Australia, the costs stemming from the rescue of passengers from a ship stuck in ice are soaring into the millions. Luck put the US Coast Guard heavy icebreaker Polar Star within a week of the beset tourist expedition ship Akademik Shokalskiy, and China’s Xue Long, which tried to free the Russian vessel before being caught itself.

Sidney Morning Herald

All of this narrative brings us back to the deep, underlying question; “WT_?” A nicer way to ask what happened to these intrepid Clouseaus of Climatology would be along these lines. “How did our understanding of the Earth’s Climate glaciate to the point where professional scientists put forth the hypothesis that Antarctic Sea Ice would be non-existent this year and then sally forth to prove it without even performing perfunctory pre-mission analysis necessary to enhance their probabilities of self-preservation?” Asked more simply; “WT_?”

David Gerlenter offers us potential insight. He describes an epistemological mindset in which all subjectivity must be banished if we ever want the Capital T Truth.

“The history of philosophy of mind over the past one hundred years,” the eminent philosopher John Searle has written, “has been in large part an attempt to get rid of the mental”—i.e., the subjective—“by showing that no mental phenomena exist over and above physical phenomena. Why bother? Because to present-day philosophers, Searle writes, “the subjectivist ontology of the mental seems intolerable.”

Commentary Magazine

So this is bad, and gets Climate Clowns snowed in at the South Pole? Why yes and yes it could. You see, imagination and common-sense are also subjective attributes. You can’t really measure the luminosity of the mental light bulb that comes on when something up there just clicks. Thomas Edison tested the platinum wires for over a year until he had the inspiration to try running electricity through copper wires instead. It came to him one day and things fell right into place. He had no algorithm to get a breakthrough, he just worked until the circuit clicked upstairs and he too could yell “Eureka!”

And the end state of this banishing of all subjectivity is a professional loss of humanity amongst the great scientific minds. Rush Limbaugh mocks his ideological opponents by claiming he does it with one-half his brain tied behind his back. He’s sardonically joking. Modern science seems to actually operate in that fashion when it literally banishes all subjectivity. Gerlenter decries this as the closing of the scientific mind.

Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out—at least in all political areas. We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming, or the line that men and women are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists?

This lack of skepticism, this inability to question and this blind following of sightless leaders was decried by Jesus in The New Testament. He predicted failure. He described it as falling into a ditch. When the blind lead the blind towards the South Pole, they both wind up needing an American ice-breaker.

The final question involves something President Eisenhower hit upon in his Farewell Address. How can science actually concern itself with the legitimate acquisition of knowledge, when it depends upon political largesse to run the labs, buy the computers and pay the graduate tuition stipends? We’d better find that answer here in America. Otherwise, China will truly inherit the Moon.

*-The fact that Mann’s Nobel Prize resides in the same trophy case as Reggie Bush’s Heisman doesn’t seem to quite pierce his all-encompassing smug cloud.

**-And if not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost.