I remain skeptical on claims that global warming is an imminent threat, and this is partly because I'm no stranger to scientific groupthink. I saw the hysteria over global warming growing, saw dissenting opinions quashed, and knew no good would come of it. This skepticism over fad science owes no doubt in part to my own background as a creationist. Again, not to touch off the evolution debate, the basis of creationist rejection of "established science" is that the establishment of said science was done through a similar process of groupthink.

But I digress. Some time ago I was pointed to a link where it was pointed out that global warming actually endures wide dispute as a theory, yet people with political agendas are still claiming there's a scientific consensus. Frankly I think it's wise to find some alternative energy sources and to use more nuclear power (which is quite clean and doesn't have anywhere near the waste problem it was claimed to have), although anyone who thinks corn-based ethanol is a viable solution is staggeringly misinformed. Still, I don't think carbon dioxide is our real problem and if it is, prominent scientists like Freeman Dyson have suggested it's far easier to control through managing forests and agriculture.

The point of all the ecological hand-wringing, though, besides political gain on the part of folks like Al Gore, is to make us revert to a simpler lifestyle. The goal of organizations like Greenpeace is just tired old Luddism in an unsubtle disguise. Hence the flawed Kyoto protocol, which is essentially nothing more than an economic wet blanket and targeted at all the wrong people; the US Senate rejected it almost unanimously during the Clinton administration for that reason. There's this hugely mistaken belief among a lot of well-meaning but hopelessly naïve (read: stupid) people that modern technology is innately destructive and we'd all be better off living in huts like your boilerplate sub-Saharan African village. The problem with that is, sub-industrial societies are second only to hyper-industrial societies (think modern China, 19th-century England) in their capacity to destroy the environment. Modern information economies on the other hand have made huge strides in improving the environment.

Or to put it all more succinctly, dissent on the climate issue is being shouted down by people who are literally too stupid to be entrusted with an opinion in the first place.

Anyway, all of that was going somewhere, and it's this: It turns out the bacon may not kill me after all. In the New York Times of all places, there's an article strongly condemning this exact same scientific groupthink that has led doctors for several decades to believe that more fat intake equals more heart disease. There have been dissenters for quite some time but they've been pushed into the minority, mostly by doctors who haven't studied the issue at all. Even a lot of nutritionists are going on second-hand information; although they're trained in the field, they've been trained based on this flawed hypothesis. (Thanks to Instapundit for both of the above links.)

Indeed my fiancée and her family are all on low-carb diets. Her parents are both diabetic, and she too was diagnosed borderline diabetic over a year ago. On low-carb, they all started dropping copious amounts of weight. (I am not on low-carb, and I'm a programmer. For me the opposite is true.) While there's significant evidence that a low-carb diet is not for everyone, not even necessarily for everyone who's diabetic, it seems to be quite effective. They're just three people of many who are bucking the "established science" and thriving.

The point is, the next time someone tells you science has reached its conclusions on something, know that they're wrong. The conclusions may well be right, but science rarely actually does reach conclusions, and seldom reaches consensus. Remember, at one time people thought--and thought they had verified through their experiments--that living creatures were spontaneously generated from certain conditions, not necessarily always born naturally. Our understanding of heat used to be that materials contained a fluid called "caloric" that they released under friction. For two millennia people believed the universe was more or less the same all throughout infinite space, just galaxies and stars going on forever, all because Aristotle took the idea into his head at one point; more modern theories suggest the universe is at least 78 billion light-years in diameter, and that figure too is in flux.

We're all still learning. In the meantime, let's all resolve to have more bacon.