August 18, 2008

Another Nail in the Coffin of Global Warming

he so-called Global Climate scientists who support the theory are into political and statistical manipulations to get the results they want, and this remarkable summary by Bishop Hill goes far in refuting the old Hockey Stick Graph canard propped up by the world's friendly and ambitionless Al Gore.

Take about 20 minutes and read it in its entirety. Below is a bit to get you started.

And if you want great access to both sides of the argument on a daily basis, add Climate Debate Daily to your list of must-reads.

There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in a single posting. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written and piecing it together from the individual CA postings has been a long, hard but fascinating struggle. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.

Posted by witnit at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2007

Them Globally Warmed Aussies

ep.

Those Aussie newspaper writers know how to keep any bias out of their reporting...

...and to subtly hint at their meaning:

LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin' continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ's sake.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by witnit at 7:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 8, 2007

Global Warming Drives...Cat Population?

hat's what an adoption group says,

Posted by witnit at 2:22 PM | Comments (2)

April 16, 2007

Overpopulation Causes Global Warming

hink, Sting and The Police...

Every breath you take is a prelude to expelling carbon dioxide, which of course proves once again that Global Warming is human-caused.

Population is out of control, especially in third-world countries, which is why I finally get why environementalists have banned DDT and other pesticides being sold and used in Africa and elsewhere...Malaria is a natural population inhibitor. Good for the Progressive Greens! Stop those excess children in their tracks with Malaria and other insect-borne diseases.

In the meantime, I suggest that we institute "Breathing Credits" that can be obtained by planting a tree-per-year for the person who wants to stay alive but reduce their poisonous carbon dioxide exhalations.

Fortunately for us, the insidious, poisonous, evil CO2 is like oxygen to plants.

Posted by witnit at 12:43 PM | Comments (17)

April 11, 2007

Carbonated Drinks and Global Warming

was sitting in the 757 returning from Minneapolis to San Francisco thinking about Al Gore's clarion cry that carbon dioxide is the prime cause of the dreaded epidemic of Global Warming that will lead to the destruction of all civilization, when the airline attendant opened a can of La Croix sparkling water for me and my wife, and I was looking into the bubbling waters in the plastic cup, when it struck me like a thunderbolt...

I was staring directly at the culprit. The sparkling CO2 in my water was the evil gas that was poisoning my future and the future of my grandchildren. (Never mind my vascectomy, think about the CHILDREN.)

And then I was thinking about all the carbonated drinks around the world (Cokes, Perriers, Champagnes, Beers, etc.) and all the cans and bottles that are opened every single day, releasing the dreaded greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. And all the people burping the greenhouse gas back out after drinking. It must be billions of cubic feet of bad gas every day.

It's time to call for the banning of all sodas, all beers, all champagnes, all sparkling waters, all drinks that have CO2 added.

And while we're at it, we must ban all CO2 cartridges used to propel projectiles out of CO2 guns.

We have to get ahead of this before we all die, die, die!!!

For the CHILDREN!!!

Posted by witnit at 10:08 PM | Comments (3)

March 14, 2007

Gore Admits to "Over" Representation

o there's proof that Al Gore is consciously over-representing the threat of human-caused global warming in this interview from last May. Here's the relevant Q&A:

Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

A: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Thanks for admitting to being a scaremonger, Al. I have my problems with Republicans, but my biggest problem with Democrats of the "Progressive" stripe is their innate willingness to deliver the Big Lie to achieve their political goals. They like to accuse Republicans of Big Lies all the time, by in my experience that is mostly projection. Unfortunately, Republicans are more and more buying in to the Left's methods and giving in to their hyped-up fake moral stances. It's sad to see.

H/T to James Taranto.

Posted by witnit at 11:20 AM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2007

The Great Global Warming Swindle

ngland's Channel 4 has produced a documentary that is now available on YouTube, all 1 hour and 15 minutes of it. It's called The Great Global Warming Swindle, and you should have all your cult-induced friends check it out. It includes interviews with some heavyweight climate scientists. I write more on it later once I have the time, but for now go to Google.

If you have less than 10 minutes for a taste, here is the opening:

Posted by witnit at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

March 5, 2007

Global Warming Deniers

he Canadian newspaper, National Post, is running a series on the prominent scientists who deny that global warming is human caused, even some who were once strong supporters who have changed their position.

Go HERE for the list of articles. They are quite interesting.

Many in the "science is settled" camp claim that the skeptics are untrustworthy -- that they are either cranks or otherwise at the periphery of their profession, or that they are in the pockets of Exxon or other corporate interests. The skeptics are increasingly being called Deniers, a term used by analogy to the Holocaust, to convey the catastrophe that could befall mankind if action is not taken. Increasingly, too, the press is taking up the Denier theme, convincing the public that the global-warming debate is over.

In this, the first of a series, I examine The Deniers, starting with Edward Wegman. Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association. Few statisticians in the world have CVs to rival his (excerpts appear nearby).

Here are links to the actual articles:

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I
Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X
End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII

Also, check out the new documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. It probably won't win an academy award.

Posted by witnit at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)

March 1, 2007

How the Media Gets Global Catastrophes Wrong

think it's worth your time to go to Michael Crichton's speeches web site and read the second item down, "Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century" in which he describes what happened when he went looking for the facts behind the greatest global catastrophes, particularly Chernobyl.

Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.

The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.

What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.

Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.

But the shock that I had experienced reverberated within me for a while. Because what I had been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong—it was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review the data.

Check the whole thing out. More confirmation that the environmentally apocalyptic mindset surrounding Global Warming is a crock. Crichton does a fantastic job of explaining the nature of "complex systems" and why the earth is such a system, and whenever humans get involved trying to change a complex system thinking it is merely a linear system (do this with that result) they actually screw it up.

Priceless writing.

Also, be sure to read the next transcript of "Testimony of Michael Crichton before the United States Senate".

[I]n 1998-99 the American climate researcher Michael Mann and his co-workers published an estimate of global temperatures from the year 1000 to 1980. Mann's results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last thousand years. His alarming report formed the centerpiece of the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report, in 2001.

Mann's work was immediately criticized because it didn't show the well-known Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than they are today, or the Little Ice Age that began around 1500, when the climate was colder than today. But real fireworks began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, attempted to replicate Mann's study. They found grave errors in the work, which they detailed in 2003: calculation errors, data used twice, data filled in, and a computer program that generated a hockeystick out of any data fed to it-even random data. Mann's work has since been dismissed by scientists around the world who subscribe to global warning.

Why did the UN accept Mann's report so uncritically? Why didn't they catch the errors? Because the IPCC doesn't do independent verification. And perhaps because Mann himself was in charge of the section of the report that included his work.

“I’ve seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass.” Mark Twain

Posted by witnit at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

Real, Reputable Scientists Dissent on Global Warming

"I must state at the outset, that, as a scientist, I can find no substantive basis for the warming scenarios being popularly described. Moreover, according to many studies I have read by economists, agronomists, and hydrologists, there would be little difficulty adapting to such warming if it were to occur." Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was." William Gray, Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus.

"In simple terms, CO2 is the lifeblood of the planet. The vegetation we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2. This green world largely evolved during a period when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2. In and of itself, therefore, the increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet. In other words, carbon dioxide means life itself. CO2 is not a pollutant." John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama's State Climatologist and Lead Author of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Posted by witnit at 7:03 PM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2007

Apocalypto

was raised as one of Jehovah's witnesses. I was told Armageddon was coming soon. The implied date was 1975. When I began questioning some statements and assumptions at the tender age of 15, I got a lot of unreasonable, reactive, emotionally based, questioning-the-morality-of-my-questions responses. I got a taste of what kinds of things people will say and do when they are deeply attached, in a fear-based way, on an apocalyptic image.

Through the years I saw it come up in other ways:

- the Population Bomb
- the coming Ice Age
- Reagan will cause a nuclear war
- killer bees
- Amazon deforestation
- the fiat currency collapse
- Y2K
- and now human-caused Global Warming.

In every case, when you try to track down the supporting science, the reaction is rather fervently "If you're not a believer, you're a sinner." It's to the point with human-caused global warming that questioners are allied to holocaust deniers.

And last night at the Oscars, Al Gore said, "It's not a political issue, it's a moral issue." In other words, if you question the science of human-caused global warming, you are immoral.

How apocalyptic. The religion of human-caused global warming. It brings back fond memories of when I sinned as one of Jehovah's Witnesses while questioning Armageddon.

Well, it's 2007 and not only is 1975 long passed, so is the end of the millenium.

We sinners will survive this cult of human-caused global warming. As long as they don't set up concentration camps for us.

Posted by witnit at 11:13 AM | Comments (5)

February 5, 2007

Another Scientist Speaks Out Against Global Warming

n case you missed it, check out this article written by a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Here's a sample:

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

And more interesting material from The Wall Street Journal:

Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

Such reversals (and there are more) are remarkable, given that the IPCC's previous reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001, have been steadily more urgent in their scientific claims and political tone. It's worth noting that many of the policymakers who tinker with the IPCC reports work for governments that have promoted climate fears as a way of justifying carbon-restriction policies. More skeptical scientists are routinely vetoed from contributing to the panel's work. The Pasteur Institute's Paul Reiter, a malaria expert who thinks global warming would have little impact on the spread of that disease, is one example.

U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001--in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.

The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn't predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003--which is the opposite of what you'd expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.

Meanwhile, new scientific evidence keeps challenging previous assumptions. The latest report, for instance, takes greater note of the role of pollutant particles, which are thought to reflect sunlight back to space, supplying a cooling effect. More scientists are also studying the effect of solar activity on climate, and some believe it alone is responsible for recent warming.

Posted by witnit at 3:12 PM | Comments (1)

April 21, 2006

Global Scaremongering

onah Goldberg has a great essay on the upcoming Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, a movie designed to scare everyone about Global Warming.

Again...

How can everyone be so silly? How can we expect the people who can't accurately tell us the weather 3 days from now to tell us how the climate will be 50 or 100 years from now?

From computer models?

Remember GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out. The great danger of computer programming.

We have a bunch of scientists who think they know enough about weather and climate that by putting a bunch of numbers into a computer, into a program THEY created, that they can generate an accurate and predictable climate far into the future.

Right. And Microsoft will make our lives easier.

Never mind that 60 climatologists from around the world wrote Canada's prime minister that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future."

Never mind that in the last 8 years there has been no significant increase in global temperature (actually a minor decrease).

Don't tell that to Al Gore, the ex-future President of the United States who can only gain an audience by running around being the Premiere Elite Global Warming Scaremonger.

It's junk science galore. Just because everyone is saying it doesn't make it true. There's an inconvenient truth for you...

Just like the Population Bomb of the late-60s (remember when the world was going to face mass starvation?) or the Coming Ice Age of the early-1970s (remember that one?)

Everyone wants to fix the world. It's simply too much trouble for them to fix themselves.

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April 10, 2006

Global Warming Stopped in 1998

hat's right. The average Global Temperature 1998-2005 has not gone up. It has in fact slightly decreased. Tell Al Gore, quick!

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November 29, 2005

More Global Warming Sources

f you are interested in digging deeper into the studies showing that Global Warming is not as sure a thing as the MSM reports, check out The Heartland Institute.

Tons of links to studies that support Michael Crichton's statements in State of Fear, his novel on environmentalist fanatics trying to force the world into recognizing the legitimacy of global warming claims.

The novel is weak in story and character. It serves mainly as a backdrop to Crichton's polemics on how enivronmentalists seem to have little regard for scientific evidence, or at least anything contradicting their claims.


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November 28, 2005

Global Warming Sourcetexts

've been asked to supply sources for some of the Global Warming statements I've made. Here's a list of sources for various interesting facts. I'll link any I can find online, but you may have to pay for the article. More likely, you would need a univeristy library to check these sources--unless you happen to subscribe to epxensive specialty science journals:

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Global Climate Update

here are ominous signs that the Earth?s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production? with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas ? parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia ? where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree ? a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

Global warming in 2005? Nope. The above are the first two paragraphs of a NEWSWEEK article from April 28, 1975 titled: The Cooling World.

That's right. In 1975 there was massive evidence "that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with".

Here's another paragraph from the article:

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

Yep. The latest studies show that all previous studies were wrong.

Let's face the real truth here. The Coming Ice Age did not terrify people enough. It wasn't enough to get those "research funds" flowing to the researchers. It's no surprise then that when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989 and the Soviet threat diminished dramatically, thereby jeopardizing weapons research funds, that some other scare tactic, one that was not political, had to be invented.

Hello Global Warming!

Never mind that the sea level is NOT rising. That the number of glaciers is actually INCREASING in many areas around the world. That the snow pack in Antartica is INCREASING. People don't really take time to review the science.

Scare them and they will send you money. For more research.

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November 23, 2005

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous

rom Michael Crichton, a healthy reminder why you should be suspicious of global warming and other politicially charged, fear-based science claims:

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in state from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones --- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the "feeble minded." Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century --- "dangerous human pests" who represented "the rising tide of imbeciles" and who were polluting the best of the human race.

The eugenicists and the immigrationists joined forces to put a stop to this. The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

As Margaret Sanger said, "Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty ? there is not greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles." She spoke of the burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste."

Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy" by American author Lothrop Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the effort to attain a marvelous goal --- the improvement of humankind in the future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the most-forward-looking and enthusiastic --- more sterilizations were carried out in California than anywhere else in America.

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)

Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.

Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.

But in retrospect, three points stand out. First, despite the construction of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, despite the efforts of universities and the pleadings of lawyers, there was no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact, nobody at that time knew what a gene really was. The movement was able to proceed because it employed vague terms never rigorously defined. "Feeble-mindedness" could mean anything from poverty to illiteracy to epilepsy. Similarly, there was no clear definition of "degenerate" or "unfit."

Second, the eugenics movement was really a social program masquerading as a scientific one. What drove it was concern about immigration and racism and undesirable people moving into one's neighborhood or country. Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Third, and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ? where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ? no external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.

A second example of politicized science is quite different in character, but it exemplifies the hazard of government ideology controlling the work of science, and of uncritical media promoting false concepts. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a self-promoting peasant who, it was said, "solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizers and minerals." In 1928 he claimed to have invented a procedure called vernalization, by which seeds were moistened and chilled to enhance the later growth of crops.

Lysenko's methods never faced a rigorous test, but his claim that his treated seeds passed on their characteristics to the next generation represented a revival of Lamarckian ideas at a time when the rest of the world was embracing Mendelian genetics. Josef Stalin was drawn to Lamarckian ideas, which implied a future unbounded by hereditary constraints; he also wanted improved agricultural production. Lysenko promised both, and became the darling of a Soviet media that was on the lookout for stories about clever peasants who had developed revolutionary procedures.

Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. He was especially skillful at denouncing this opponents. He used questionnaires from farmers to prove that vernalization increased crop yields, and thus avoided any direct tests. Carried on a wave of state-sponsored enthusiasm, his rise was rapid. By 1937, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet.

By then, Lysenko and his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was famines that killed millions, and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the firing squads. Lysenko was aggressive in attacking genetics, which was finally banned as "bourgeois pseudoscience" in 1948. There was never any bias for Lysenko's ideas, yet he controlled Soviet research for thirty years. Lysenkoism ended in the 1960s, but Russian biology still has not entirely recovered from that era.

Now we are engaged in a great new theory that once again has drawn the support of politicians, scientists, and celebrities around the world. Once again, the theory is promoted by major foundations. Once again, the research is carried out at prestigious universities. Once again, legislation is passed and social programs are urged in its name. Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with.

Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice --- terms that have no agreed definition --- are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power."

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

Author's Message from State of Fear (incudes some dry humor)

A novel such as State of Fear, in which so many divergent views are expressed, may lead the reader to wonder where, exactly, the author stands on these issues. I have bee reading environmental texts for three years, in itself a hazardous undertaking. But I have had an opportunity to look at a lot of data, and to consider many points of view. I conclude:


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August 8, 2005

Global Warming Update

cientists rely on computer models to support the theory of Global Warming. Isn't it interesting that a theory has as its prime support a prediction?

More likely, these pseudo-scientists want your money for their "research." Thirty years ago, the theory was the coming Ice Age. And whatever happened to the Population Bomb?

*** Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science. James Inhofe

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