The “global warming controversy” might seem like one of those things that just can’t actually be a bone of contention, in regards to the most basic metric, what thermometers record each and every day, including the high and low temps for each day. This is one of those things that would be considered “a fact”, by most anyone. Nobody actually argues over the fact that all over the world, and certainly in a huge number of places in the modern world, there are very accurate and advanced systems, designed to record data.
But if something as basic as what was the temperature for a place and time is argued over, or worse, we find the data is “adjusted”, and changed, and then presented as “a fact”, and now the argument is over “what actually was the factual temperature”, it’s just crazy at that point. One might ask, why would anyone change the temperature record?
If the argument is actually at that point, where one is forced to investigate, and one finds that yes, people are actually changing the past, and then presenting the changed data as “a fact”, it’s something to contemplate. If the persons presenting changed data as “a fact” then refuse to divulge both the raw data, and how and why they insist their version is “more true”, it gets super crazy. It really does.
Because one the one hand you have somebody telling you something, that you have to take their word for it, and on the other, actual factual records that don’t show what they are claiming. And yes, this is a perfect example of when facts just won’t matter. If you can change “the facts” at will, make them different, then facts certainly don’t matter.
I mean, if the past is fluid, something that can just be changed, and then we are expected to just believe the new version, then what is a fact starts to become unclear. That the same persons insisting we believe them also become insulting and angry when faced with skepticism, then it really gets interesting.