This 2016 photo shows a man paying his respects to the estimated millions of Ukranians who died during the Stalin-era Holodomor famines. This is remembered as one of the darkest times in Ukranian history, as it left millions dead and is regarded by many as a genocide. The 1932–33 famine took place as harvests dwindled and Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s police enforced the brutal policy of collectivising agriculture by requisitioning grain and other foodstuffs. Lysenko’s promises of improved crop yields (having just come to power a few years earlier) never materialized, and further famines plagued Lysenko’s USSR. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images)

Government-Censored Science Doomed The USSR, And The USA May Be Next

The line-in-the-sand was drawn in sharpie, and the time to declare ‘no more’ is now.

When you have a question about the physical world, there are a lot of different approaches you can take. You can trust your intuition, using your experience of similar, prior situations to take a stab at what might happen this time. You can trust an authority, where you put your faith in someone else who you believe knows better. Or, you can do science, applying our best current scientific theories to the problem at hand, trusting the answer regardless of what your intuition or any authority tells you.

Earlier this September, Hurricane Dorian struck North America, causing a tremendous amount of damage in the Bahamas as well as to many locations along the east coast of the United States. But what’s most alarming is neither the strength nor the path of the hurricane, but rather how a paranoid government is undermining the best science humanity actually has.

In this NOAA GOES-East satellite image dating to September 3, 2019, Hurricane Dorian had slowed from a Category 5 to a category 2 hurricane, but pummeled the Bahamas for days as it stalled. Over the next 48 hours, the storm finally migrated up the east coast, but never affected Alabama, just as the NWS correctly forecasted. (Photo by NOAA via Getty Images)

Science is just as susceptible to the “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon as any other field. In principle, the way…