Reader’s letter: Open-minded science

I was sad to read Mr Roulstone’s letter Wake Up To Fresh Green Technology in last week’s Advertiser be-cause it depends entirely on his belief in the validity of ‘scientific consensus’.

Once upon a time 99.9% of mankind believed the earth was flat and was the centre of the universe.

An early scientist called Galileo Galilei was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for his belief that the earth revolved around the sun, known as heliocentrism. Galileo was right and the consensus supported by authority of the church was wrong.

The ‘Galileo gambit’ is a name, sometimes given to the suggestion that science is not open to criticism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Appeals to the ‘expertise of scientific authority’ are known as ‘the ad verecundiam fallacy’ and cannot be a sound argument.

Mr Roulstone should wake up to that older well-established form of science, which is based on a truly open minded approach to reality, and should not resort to insults about who should ‘open his mind to the future’.

I hope the new year may bring with it an end to the one-dimensional morality play called Net Zero in which freedom of thought and real science are suppressed in favour of dogmatism and oppression.

As the western world slowly ‘wakes up’ to the folly of ‘clean green energy’ and Net Zero the air, I think, ‘will smell fresher’ and his belief in ‘consensus science’ will be seen as ‘the Roulstone fallacy’ and just plain wrong. — R. SHEPPARD, Beckingham.