Science Wars: We need to free science from the Commissars who now control it.
Captain Compassion
control it.
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | Friday, February 27, 2004 | By Lowell Ponte
Science Wars
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 27, 2004
AMERICA IS TODAY FIGHTING TWO WARS, NOT ONE. In addition to the war
on terrorism, we are locked in a civil war over the nature and future
of our society.
As the Chinese military philosopher Sun-tzu spelled out 23 centuries
ago in his classic The Art of War, such warfare is not confined to a
distant battlefield. It is all-encompassing and pervades every aspect
of our lives. It is fought in the classroom, with teachers subtly
taking sides in what they teach. It is fought through the bias of
reporters, actors, singers, preachers, activists for
seemingly-unconnected causes, merchants, scholars and, of course,
politicians.
And as David Horowitz so rightly makes clear in his 2000 classic The
Art of Political War, the Left in America is attacking on all these
fronts in what is “Culture War” and more. If the Right fails to
confront and defeat our enemies on all these battlefields, the America
of Jefferson, Washington and Franklin could be destroyed.
Politics, in other words, is not limited to the debates of lawmakers
nor to elections in which the public votes every two years. Politics
is now all-pervasive, injecting itself and playing an
often-destructive role in areas of life we used to believe were
a-political, clean and objective.
Science, for example, once appeared to be the pure pursuit of truth
and knowledge by priest-like men and women dressed in white garments.
But last week two small groups of these priests – one from the Union
of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the other from the less strident
National Research Council (NRC) – launched transparently-political
attacks on President George W. Bush.
Sigmund Freud first coined the psychoanalytic term “projection” to
describe those who accuse others of what they themselves do. A thief,
for example, will tend to see others around him as thieves. And so it
was that these two politicized groups accused President Bush of
injecting “politics” into American science.
Science, you need to understand, is in America today a
mostly-socialist institution – and one of the most “politicized”
realms in our society. Most science is now done with government grants
or at government institutions such as state universities.
The overriding agenda of nearly all science is to make government
bigger and its spending on science more lavish. Any President who aims
to cut taxes and reduce the size of government is, therefore, by
definition the enemy of our scientific establishment.
To understand science and scientists in America today, you need to
think of them as existing in the now-extinct Soviet Union. This was
first brought home to me many years ago, when I was a climate
specialist about to deliver a paper at the First International
Conference on Iceberg Utilization.
After listening for several minutes to an obviously-illogical
discourse by another speaker, I turned to my seatmate and asked how
many of our colleagues would correct the last point the speaker made.
“Nobody will correct him,” the scientist replied grimly, “because
that’s the man who controls who gets all the National Science
Foundation grants in this field.”
Every field of science in America today has its Commissars, the
politically-chosen bosses who control the government grants. Each
field has its own top journals in which scientists building a career
in that specialty are expected to publish their work, and each journal
has a top editor. These power-brokers almost always have their own
biases. If a young scientist wants promotions and salary-increases, he
or she will conform to those well-known Commissar biases. To do
contrary research is to risk being dismissed as a heretic or as
Politically Incorrect.
In the field of climatology, for example, the official orthodoxy since
the 1920s has been that, all else being equal, the carbon dioxide
released by burning fossil fuel should be causing global warming. Woe
onto the young scientist who, e.g., dared point out that such burning
also releases smoke and smog, which reduce sunlight reaching Earth’s
surface, which might explain periods like 1940-1978 during which
fossil fuel burning increased while much of our world was measurably
cooling.
The path to individual career success, and to more government funding
for institutions such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR), has been to do studies that supported this Greenhouse Theory
of global warming.
“We ought to ‘ride’ the global warming issue,” said unctuous Senator
Tim Wirth (D.-Colorado) nearly 30 years ago, “because even if the
theory eventually proves wrong, it will lead us to make changes we
should make anyway.” The changes sought by Wirth, of course, included
vastly higher taxes, more controls on private industry, and a
denigration of capitalism.
But because Democrats like Wirth for many decades controlled the
government budgets of institutions like NCAR – and those who fattened
on these government budgets were the Commissars who decided the fate
of young scientists – this pro-Greenhouse Effect bias has become
deeply entrenched. Most scientists who dared voice contrary evidence
or theories were driven out of climatology or into the wilderness of
academic backwaters.
This restriction of free thought and expression is not limited to
climate scientists. As I witnessed during 15 years as Roving Science
Editor at Reader’s Digest, such political Commissars and their biases
largely control most fields of science in America today. Our
scientists are only slightly freer than were Soviet scientists during
the reign of intellectual terror imposed by Stalin’s eccentric science
czar Trofim Lysenko.
The prominent scientists who last week hypocritically accused
President Bush of “politicizing” American science were, for the most
part, these very Commissars.
The dirty little secret the Leftist press did not tell you is that our
science was already politicized decades ago. The current war is merely
over whose politics will prevail. Will it be the present ruling
Establishment whose Big Government agenda parallels that of the
Democratic Party? Or will it be the more decentralized, open science
advocated by President Bush that in many areas dispels dogma and
permits a wider diversity of scientific views to be recognized and
heard?
The list of scientists rounded up by the Union of Concerned Scientists
to sign its “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking” letter
attacking President Bush looks impressive to most people. What you
need to remember is that scientists are human beings, too. They have
political and ideological views. They have selfish interests that
influence their opinions, just like everybody else.
And outside their narrow field of expertise, scientists are often no
wiser than the drunk at the end of the bar in your local saloon. In
fact they are often more foolish than this drunk, because those with
the power of science Commissars often become intoxicated with the
notion that knowledge and intellect in one field empowers them to
speak with the authority of gods in all fields.
Because President Bush has been cutting and redirecting scientific
budgets, he is viewed as a mortal threat by many scientists. For some,
signing this attack may have been a matter of idealism – “My field of
research is vitally important to humankind, and President Bush should
get a ‘brush back’ pitch to make him more aware of its importance.”
For others, signing this attack might have been outright selfishness –
“Mr. Bush is favoring policies that will lead to big cuts in my
personal research, or that will reduce the importance and power of the
field where I am Commissar. I’ll make him pay a political price for
this.” (This was the tenor of the National Research Council report, an
almost direct demand for more taxpayer money and preference for
certain research.)
And for some, signing the anti-Bush attack was probably outright
partisanship – “I’m going to use my position to smear this stupid
cowboy and cost him votes in November. How dare he take away my budget
and give it to other scientists, or tell me to include the views of
scientists I disagree with in the journals and grants I control! I
want him replaced with a Democrat like me!”
One familiar name among the signers of this political attack is Paul
Ehrlich of Stanford University. In his field of expertise Ehrlich is a
giant. His expertise, like that of the late Harvard neo-Marxist
Stephen Jay Gould, is as the world’s leading biological authority on
certain species of bugs.
Trouble is, Ehrlich has the delusion that being a bug scientist makes
him an expert in many other fields. He authored the sky-is-falling
doomsday book The Population Bomb nearly 40 years ago that predicted
overpopulation would by now have destroyed our planet through famine
and global war. Like Karl Marx, his predictions have proven false
again and again. And yet hubris and lust for the limelight prompts
Ehrlich to keep thrusting himself into political issues.
In 1984 Ehrlich joined anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan and other
politicized scientists in authoring The Cold and the Dark: The World
After Nuclear War, which claimed that nuclear war would plunge our
planet into the ice age of “nuclear winter.” Ehrlich, a bug scientist,
was putting himself forward as an expert on global climate, nuclear
weapons and nuclear war.
Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist and expert on other planets, created a
computer model of Earth to demonstrate “nuclear winter,” and the world
media dutifully reported his claims as fact.
Dr. Stephen Schneider, then at NCAR as Deputy Head of the Climate
Project and now at Stanford University, wondered why Sagan bothered to
create his own computer model. “We would have been glad to let Sagan
simulate nuclear war on NCAR’s Supercomputer model,” Dr. Schneider
told me.
But when Schneider tried to duplicate Sagan’s results on the NCAR
computers, he discovered that “the most we could replicate was a
little bit of ‘nuclear autumn,’ a bit more frost in a few places.”
Upon examining the model Sagan had shown to the world press to “prove”
the danger of “nuclear winter,” Schneider found it was of a barren
ball of rock with no mountains and no oceans. Oceans, as both
Schneider and Sagan knew, act as gigantic energy flywheels that
moderate temperature, helping cool adjacent continents in summer and
warm them in winter.
Sagan, in other words, knowingly committed deliberate scientific
fraud. He cooked up a phony computer model to concoct the phony
“nuclear winter” results he wanted for political reasons. He avoided
the already-available NCAR computer climate model precisely because he
knew it would not produce the “nuclear winter” he wanted to sell to
gullible journalists and an ignorant public. And were he still alive,
Sagan would doubtless be among the signers, like Ehrlich, of this
letter accusing President Bush of politicizing science.
The Union of Concerned Scientists letter rests on a larger February
2004 document entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An
Investigation into the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science.
As you can guess from the word “Misuse” in its title, this
pseudo-scientific report is an entirely one-sided attack. As you would
expect from the rulers of today’s socialist science establishment, it
allows not one word, not one “devil’s advocate” sentence to give the
Bush Administration’s view from the other side. It is an unrelieved
screed of attack and political vituperation with no pretense of
balance or fairness.
The document is simply, therefore, a lie. You can look at its first
sentence – “The U.S. government runs on information….” – and find
yourself saying “No, the government runs on money, and your real
objection to President Bush is that he is beginning to disperse the
government science budget in ways that remove money from the monopoly
of longtime establishment Commissars.”
The authors are furious that in an Environmental Protection Agency
memo on climate change, “White House officials demanded so many
qualifying words such as ‘potentially’ and ‘may’ that the result would
have been to insert ‘uncertainty…where there is essentially none.’”
(page six)
But this has been the problem all along with Greenhouse theory. Almost
all climatologists bend their knee to the theory, but few have agreed
that indisputable evidence in the form of measured global warming (at
the predicted rates and in the predicted places) have yet given a
clear “signal” that confirms the theory.
Those like former Senator Wirth, eager to “ride” the Greenhouse theory
to higher taxes and socialist policies, have been furious with genuine
scientists who insist on putting in those qualifiers. Those qualifiers
mean that global warming is not a sure thing, and that therefore
radical policies to deal with it are premature.
What this attack on President Bush reveals is that he is the genuine
scientist who wants extreme claims to be carefully qualified and
circumscribed. And it reveals that those attacking Bush are
irresponsible, unscientific, and motivated by politics instead of a
sincere search for facts.
“The Bush administration went further by distorting the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control’s (CDC) science-based performance measures to test
whether abstinence-only programs were proving effective,” says the
report (page 10). Translation: Clinton Administration left-overs at
CDC were prevented from cooking the books to discredit
“abstinence-only” research.
Oddly enough, I do not remember the Union of Concerned Scientists
objecting when President Bill Clinton ordered creation of a whole
research section at CDC to study injuries to “children” caused by
firearms – even though guns by no stretch of imagination can be called
a disease.
Nor did UCS object when this Clinton political project, obviously
intended to concoct a medical basis for further firearms control and
confiscation, put out a study of how many “children” had been killed
by guns – and defined “children” as those up to 22 years of age. This
was done, of course, because almost no small children die from gunfire
– and so the logical parameters of the study were gimmicked up by
including more young adults killed in inner city drug turf war
shootouts.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a Leftist advocacy group, does not
like sexual abstinence. To do a CDC study that might give it
legitimacy as a way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (which
new research suggests will infect 50 percent or more of young
Americans) is politically incorrect. But UCS Leftists hate guns in
citizen hands. A rigged, gimmicked CDC study wholly unrelated to
disease that could create a pretext to outlaw guns is politically
correct – and that is ordered by a Democratic president – hence is not
a political “misuse” of science.
The Bush Administration applied pressure to “make it harder to list
threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act (page fourteen).
Honest researchers will remind you that the Clinton-Gore
Administration tried to add 3,000 new species, mostly bugs, to this
act – and to make it impossible to remove any species that was listed,
even if it proved no longer to be “endangered.” Had this become law,
it would put every inch of private property in the United States under
the developmental control of Federal bureaucrats.
Less than three years ago, two Federal wildlife inspectors were caught
planting tufts of hair from "endangered" species in Northwestern
forests scheduled for logging. Their obvious intent was to have these
illegitimate specimens “found” and used as a pretext to block the
logging. Such Federal jobs have been filled by environmental
enthusiasts and political activists, an unknown number of whom could
use fraudulent science to achieve their political objectives.
Most of the “endangered species” listed under the Endangered Species
Act are not even species – they are subspecies. The “Northern Spotted
Owl” that blocked logging in much of the Pacific Northwest is a
virtually identical subspecies of the “Mexican Spotted Owl,” of which
a very unendangered eight million live in the Southwestern United
States and northern Mexico.
How different does a subspecies have to be to gain protected status?
In theory no two individuals are identical, not even genetic twins, so
every living thing on the planet could be deemed the patriarch or
matriarch of a future new species.
Every claim in this anti-Bush study could be dissected and disputed in
similar fashion. But the study gives only one side, depending on the
Leftist bias and general ignorance of the media to echo the claim that
Bush is politicizing science. In truth, Bush is exorcising the
monolithic control of socialist scientists who politicized science
long ago.
One good step forward for freedom of thought and scientific integrity:
remove every dollar of Federal money from those who have traded their
scientific objectivity for political partisanship by signing this
anti-Bush document. They, as Carl Sagan did, have ceased to be
scientists and become mere politicians.
Another recent story of science and politics has echoed through the
American and British media. “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: Climate
Change Will Destroy Us,” screamed the headline of last Sunday’s
Observer, sister publication of England’s Laborite Guardian newspaper.
This news story told of a “secret” Pentagon report that forecast
rioting and nuclear war caused by rapid climate change. This report in
fact had never been “secret,” nor was this story news – just a rehash
of a similarly breathless piece by David Stipp in the January 26 issue
of Fortune Magazine.
The actual report, entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its
Implications for United States National Security, was done for the
Department of Defense last October as a contingency study. To prepare
for the unexpected, our government commissions a wide and wild range
of studies into hypothetical risks. I used to be a think tank
researcher working on the potential risks of high tech terrorism,
weather-climate manipulation, and other contingencies.
“The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable – to push
the boundaries of current research on climate change,” write
futurologists Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business
Network, neither of whom are climatologists. “We have created a
climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is
plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways
that should be considered immediately.”
What they produced in exchange for tax dollars, in other words, was a
low-probability, high-risk scenario that ought to be considered. No,
Chicken Little, the sky is not yet falling as Leftist journalists
would have you believe.
In fact, very little is new in this report. Most of its ideas and
analyses can be found in my 1976 book The Cooling, published by
Prentice-Hall (with forward by U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell and preface
by University of Wisconsin climatologist Dr. Reid A. Bryson.) The
Cooling, I’m told, has been used as a textbook at the National Defense
College to expand the thinking of some of America’s highest level
military planners.
Come to think of it, I gave Peter Schwartz a copy of my book sometime
around 1979 or 1980, when we spent a delightful afternoon chatting in
his office then at Stanford Research Institute. He is a brilliant
fellow whose scenarios enriched such Hollywood movies as “War Games,”
“Sneakers,” “Deep Impact,” and “Minority Report.” I’m delighted that
he and a few safely-tenured maverick scientists have carried forward
and expanded the analysis I first laid out of how global warming could
plunge the world into rapid global cooling, even a sudden ice age.
Such cutting-edge and innovative thinking should also be done by
America’s brightest young scientists, not just those of us Ph.D.s who
worked as futurists in the think tank community. We can no longer
afford to lock our best minds into the prison of Leftist conformity
that American science has become.
By breaking the stranglehold of today’s socialist conformity
Commissars, President Bush may be able to restore a healthy diversity
of ideas and freedom of thought to American science. This is a war
for freedom of thought and ideas, and those fighting for liberation
are in and on the Right.
Thinkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
chains! You have a world to win!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
"Madmen reason rightly from the wrong premisis" -- Locke
You can never redistribute wealth only poverty. Because of the natural
inequities of man and the nature of wealth it is impossible for all men
to be rich. It is possible for all men to be poor. Just ask any Socialist
they can tell you how. -- Captain Compassion
Joseph R. Darancette
res0...@NOSPAMverizon.net