A while back I wrote a post “On Carbon and Sodium” where I pointed out that in spite of the fact that researchers have known for forty years that it is the Chlorine (Chloride) in table salt that causes hypertension and seems generally bad for you, a massive government apparatus was set up requiring the labeling of foods for their Sodium content and a generation of nutrition students was inculcated with the importance of a low Sodium diet.

As a practical matter the regulation of Sodium has much the same effect as properly regulating Chloride would have, except when other Chloride salts are substituted for Sodium. The take home lesson for me is that when bad science infects government, it develops a life of its own.

The relationship between science and government changed in the twentieth century. Partly as a result of the Manhattan Project and partly because the new machines, mass spectrometers and computers, were a stretch for private research. What Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex has an analog in science. Public universities have replaced Bell Labs.

So now we have a vast government apparatus regulating Carbon in spite of the fact that the only evidence that human CO2 warms the atmosphere is a circumstantial correlation in the slope of trends from the late seventies to the late nineties. The preponderance of evidence from ice cores, the geological record, and sixteen years of insignificant warming as human CO2 accelerated argues against this correlation.

Continued belief in the face of contradictory evidence is not science, it is theology. Carbon theology, Sodium theology. I believe in freedom of religion, but I also believe in the separation of church and state.