Trofim Lysenko became the
Director of the Soviet Lenin
All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef
Stalin. He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by
plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from
the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics. As a
result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern
genetics.
Under Lysenko’s view, for
example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new
plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted
plant. Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later
generations stemming from that seed. Or that plucking all the leaves off
of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless
Lysenkoism was
“politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with
certain broader Marxist doctrines. Marxists wanted to believe that
heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics
changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations
of humans. Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.
Also Lysenko himself
arose from a peasant background and developed his theories from practical
applications rather than controlled scientific experiments. This fit the
Marxist propaganda of the time holding that brilliant industrial innovations
would arise from the working classes through practical applications.
Lysenko’s theories also seemed to address in a quick and timely manner the widespread
Soviet famines of the time arising from the forced collectivization of
agriculture, rather than the much slower changes from scientific
experimentation and genetic heredity.
Lysenko was consequently
embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine. Scientists
who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were
favored with government funding and official recognition and award.
Lysenko and his followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning
their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting the advance
of the new modern Marxism.
The V.I. Lenin Academy of
Agricultural Sciences announced on August 7, 1948 that thenceforth Lysenkoism
would be taught as the only correct theory. All Soviet scientists were
required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenkoism. Ultimately,
Soviet geneticists resisting Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even executed.
Lysenkoism was abandoned for the correct
modern science of Mendelian genetics only as late as 1964.
The Theory of Man Caused
Catastrophic Global Warming
This same practice of
Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the
politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.
That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly
increased government powers and control over the private economy.
Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled
media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.
Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still
bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.
Those who promote the
theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist
environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award. Faked and
tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct
theory. Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only
theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?
Those in positions of scientific
authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because
they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money,
publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the
integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.
The United States Global
Change Research Program (USGCRP) is supposed to represent the best science of
the U.S. government on the issue of global warming. In January, the
USGCRP released the draft of its Third National Climate Assessment
Report. The first duty of the government scientists at the USGCRP is to
produce a complete picture of the science of the issue of global warming, which
is what the taxpayers are paying them for. But it didn’t take long for
the Cato Institute to do the job of the USGCRP with a devastating line by line
rebuttal, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate
Change, Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012,
by Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling, Mary J.
Hutzler & Craig D. Idso.
Check it out for yourself
if you dare. Both publications are written to be accessible by
intelligent laymen. See which one involves climate science and which one
involves political science.
All the climate alarmist
organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of
them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global
warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing
institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly
rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered,
and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by
dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate
Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international
headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global
warming.
Again, check it out for
yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand
pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real
scientific debate.
The editors of the once
respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science
for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as
the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their
published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the
friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic
catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when
authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection
and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists.
They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel,
dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established
methodologies of complex statistical analysis.
Formerly respected scientific
bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by
political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then
proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic
catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual
scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global
warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled
science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where
reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the
science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that
there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.
Indeed, 31,487 U.S.
scientists (including 9,000 Ph.Ds) with degrees in atmospheric Earth sciences,
physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that
reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon
dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and
disruption of the Earth’s climate.” See here. Some consensus.
Real science, of course,
is not a matter of “consensus,” but of reason, with skepticism at its core.
2 of 2
The Decline and Fall of
the Theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global WarmingThe alarmist claims of the UN’s IPCC are ultimately based not on scientific observations, but on unvalidated climate models and their projections of future global temperatures on assumptions of continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning and use of fossil fuels. The alarmists are increasingly in panic because the past projections of the models are increasingly divergent from the accumulating actual temperature records. Those models are not real science, but made up science. And no way we are abandoning the industrial revolution as the Sierra Club is hoping based on model fantasies and fairy tales.
The Economist magazine, formerly in
lockstep with the Lysenkoists, shocked them with a skeptical article in March
that began with this lede:
“OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at
the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have
continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the
atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put
there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global
temperature has been flat for a decade. . . .’”
Reality is not complying
with the alarmism of the UN’s global warming models, just as it refused to do
for Trofim Lysenko. Remember all that hysteria about melting polar ice
caps and the disappearing ice floes for the cute polar bears? As of the
end of March, the Antarctic ice cap was nearly one fourth larger than the
average for the last 30 years. The Arctic ice cap had grown back to
within 3% of its 30 year average. (The formerly declining Arctic ice was
due to cyclically warm ocean currents). Global sea ice was greater than in
March, 1980, more than 30 years ago, and also above the average since then.
Remember the alarm about
the rising sea level? Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since
the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. Just exactly as
it has been, at the same rate. And anyone you know that has been scared
by this alarmist propaganda has been successfully played by whatever media the
fool has been relying on.
Murderous recent winters
in Europe are killing as well belief in alarmist global warming on the continent.
University of Oklahoma Professor and geophysicist David Deming reported in a
recent column,
“The United Kingdom had the coldest March
weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low
temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported
that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring
snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in
134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles
to clear snow from the streets.”
In the Northern
Hemisphere, Deming adds, “Snow cover last December was the greatest since
satellite monitoring began in 1966.” That reflects similarly bitter cold
winters in North America as well. Despite claims by global warming
Lysenkoists that soon children “won’t know what snow is,” on February 6, 2010,
a blizzard covered the northeastern U.S. with 20 to 35 inches of snow.
Three days later another 10 to 20 inches were added.
These developments should
have been expected from known indisputable facts. Carbon dioxide is a
natural substance essential to the survival of all life on the planet. It
is effectively oxygen for plants, and without plants there would be no food for
animals to survive. Because of the increased atmospheric CO2 agricultural
output is already increasing.
CO2 is also a trace gas
in the atmosphere, representing only 0.038% of the total atmosphere, up only
0.008% since 1945. That tiny proportion of the atmosphere is supposed to
produce catastrophic global warming that will end all life on the planet?
The historical proxy record shows CO2 concentrations in the distant history of
the earth much, much greater than today. Yet life survived, and
flourished. Moreover, the basic science of global warming is that the
temperature increasing effect of increased CO2 concentrations declines as those
concentrations increase. So stop worrying and enjoy the agricultural
abundance in your grocery store.
A tip off regarding
reality should have been apparent from the dodgy propaganda involved in
changing the labeling of the problem from “global warming” to “climate
change.” Of course, Earth has been experiencing climate change since the
first sunrise on the planet. We are not going to abandon the workers’ paradise
of capitalism because climate change will continue.
Another tip off should
have been the effective admission by global warming alarmists that they cannot
defend their position in public debate. The day the theory of
anthropogenic catastrophic global warming died can be dated from the time that
one leading alarmist was foolish enough to debate James Taylor of the Heartland
Institute, a video of which can be found on the Heartland website at Heartland.org.
Still another tip off
should have been the practice of the alarmist new Lysenkoists to respond to
dissenting science with ad hominem attacks. That apparently
reflects poor public schooling that never taught that an ad hominem attack
is a logical fallacy, as Aristotle taught more than 2,000 years ago. My
how western science has fallen.
The basic science shows
that global temperatures are just not very sensitive to CO2 itself. Even
alarmists will concede that. Where they get their alarm is with the
modeling assumption that the CO2 induced temperature increases will produce
positive feedbacks that will sharply increase the overall resulting
warming. The better recent science indicates, however, that instead of
positive feedbacks, the naturally stable Earth would enjoy negative feedbacks
restoring long term equilibrium and stability to global temperatures.
Then there is the man
caused, global warming, fingerprint that the U.N.’s models all showed would
result in a hot spot of particularly large temperature increases in the upper
troposphere above the tropics. But the incorruptible, satellite
monitored, atmospheric temperature record shows no hot spot. That is
further confirmed by modern weather balloons measuring atmospheric temperatures
above the tropics. No hotspot. No fingerprint. No
catastrophic, man caused global warming. QED.
The revival of western
science requires that the new Lysenkoism be discredited. That is going to
require quite some work, given the extent of the infestation.
Source: Forbes, Peter Ferrara, 4/28/2013 @ 8:00AM |17,539 views 
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