From Forbes: The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory
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.
…
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.
Read the entire essay here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/04/28/the-disgraceful-episode-of-lysenkoism-brings-us-global-warming-theory/
h/t to Dennis Ray Wingo
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There is a host of self-centred and greedy ulterior motives different people have for supporting the AGW paradigm.
1- For researchers, once a paradigm becomes popular and dominant, it is career limiting to oppose it.
2- If the climate is presented as something about which governments can make policies, then government money will flow for research. If climate is something that we cannot affect, funding is not going to be as forthcoming.
3- Plus of course it gives researchers a good feeling to imagine that they’re working to ‘save the world’ instead of, say, developing a new scent for feminine hygiene products.
4- Environmentalists see carbon emission control as a means to reduce real pollutants like NOx, SO2, Hg, etc. as a side effect.
5- Luddites see carbon strangulation as a way of dismantling the industrial economies to force everyone to a much reduced subsistence.
6- ‘Personal isolationists’ try to use AGW as a way to eliminate big utility companies, with power generated at home from wind, solar, or even car batteries, and even sold to the local grid at retail (or higher) rates.
7- EU trade isolationists see carbon regulation as a way of increasing the energy cost, and thus decreasing the competitiveness, of North American economies _vis a vis_ EU ones.
8- Opportunities to use carbon emissions as pretexts to block or heavily tariff imports abound, thus degrading international trade even further.
9- Local trade isolationists like the idea of overseas products becoming more expensive, and if they can’t do that by punitive tariffs and quotas, they hope to do so by artificially driving up shipping costs.
10- Various people see Kyoto-type agreements as a way of transferring wealth from developed economies to lesser ones, as the one-time Canadian Liberal Party cabinet minister Stewart once claimed.
11- Some also envision carbon strangulation as a pretext for involving governments deeply into the economy, via direct and indirect subsidies for energy alternatives that can claim to be ‘green’. Naturally, those who are involved and invested in such industries have their own greed factor.
12- Believers in Big Government also love the idea of sending governments even more of our money under any pretext, and use carbon taxes as a way to transfer even more money to people in lower income levels.
13- Some politicians see taking ‘the west’ off oil as a means of removing the dependence the US in particular has on politically uncertain sources.
14- Other politicans see ‘cap & trade’ or other quota management as a way to direct corruption to their buddies and relatives.
15- Nuclear energy proponents see carbon strangulation as a way to promote nuclear power.
16- Some people imagine that energy cost reductions will magically pay for, and even squeeze profit from, expensive carbon control technologies whose payback times are actually measured (when they aren’t just dead costs) in decades.
17- Opportunistic “businessmen” see the panic of the masses as an opportunity to solicit donations to so-called “non-profit” organizations or to operate carbon credit companies in order to enrich themselves financially.
18- Financial trading corporations like Goldman Sachs see carbon trading as an opportunity to generate a new financial bubble out of an inexistant commodity (carbon credits) with which to justify huge profits and staggering executive bonuses.
19- In politics it is generally held far more important to be consistent than it is to be right. Lies and errors about warming are thus propagated further, instead of being squelched, in order to bolster the political optics.
20- Some people propose deliberately crushing economic growth to be an improvement over what they think will happen if we let growth proceed naturally.
21- The UN sees carbon credits as an opportunity to create a tax base for itself and a steady income.
22- And there are some who are actually sincere, who desperately want to believe that they can by sacrificing (or by forcing the rest of us to sacrifice) contribute to saving the world. But just because you make a sacrifice to superstition doesn’t mean that your AGW deity is going to come through for you.
@GlynnMhor
That is a pretty complete list of AGW drivers imho.
At the primary and secondary level maybe, but at the tertiary level likely not. The standard texts do not appear to have changed. See, for example, TR Oke’s Boundary Layer Climates.
We tend to obsess a bit here about the latest papers in the scientific journals, forgetting that 80% are tosh that is soon forgotten and never referenced by later research.
Yes wrong he was, indeed his ideas set the then USSR back nearly a generation in terms of genetic science: his ideas endorsed and rewarded by Stalin as the good communist view of how the world should work.
And as wrong as the rejection of so called Jewish science by the then German Nationalist Socialist State: even though that actually produced the atomic bomb. And the Russian version of the Atomic device was the last great triumph of the once Czarist physicists.
Yet the strange thing about Lysenko was that mistaken though he was he was also a superb agronomist who took then Soviet peasant farming into a new era of relatively high production: which was then wasted by collective farming.
Well it’s a mad, mad world my masters and no more so now than then.
Kindest Regards. .
I’m impressed Forbes would print something like this, even as an op-ed. Given that the author is a member of the Heartland Inst, he has good background to enjoy defending his essay in the comments.
I keep thinking it’s time to create a page called “climate at the crossroads” (I have a great photo to go with it) and list all the articles from sources that are retreating from going with the alarmist point of view.
I suspect it would keep me fairly busy….
“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.”
Word is out for real now, in a way anybody can fully comprehend. Skeptics were not the ones deceived, but the pent up wrath that activists pointed at them as an evil, dehumanized “other” now has nowhere to go but back to its source.
Even the product design world that I work in is abruptly rejecting green for being a dead end depressing fashion, in favor of high tech.
I stumbled into this… no sensitivity debate: http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-pause-in-global-warming-what-does.html
Is that anything like the Potemkin consensus?
Tom… I know that a lot of you will not be keen about my analysis of the pause in global warming found at http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-pause-in-global-warming-what-does.html
…but hopefully we all kind find a middle ground based on facts and not hype and politics…cliff
Hey all you WUWT regulars, Peter Ferrera could use a little help defending himself from the Gorebots. Let’s inundate them with empirical data.
TomRude says:
April 28, 2013 at 1:43 pm
I stumbled into this… no sensitivity debate: http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-pause-in-global-warming-what-does.html
===============
A remarkably non-hysterical article. Thanks.
“But, let’s face it, some of those believing in the serious nature of global warming have also been confusing the public. ” LOL. Now there’s a major understatement. 🙂
I encourage everyone to read the whole article. I’ve been banging on about this for a long time.
Lysenkoism is the route to understand how this politically correct scientific theory became to dominate.
GlynnMohr, I get into all sorts of squabbles with people as I pick apart the AGW BS. In your list, #6, “personal isolationists”, please understand that there are a few of us who appreciate the beauty and joy of living on the fringe of the wilderness, and we are neither anti-social nor AGW rabble rousers. The various government expenditures make off-grid living a bit easier, with reduced prices for some items and tax deduction/credits/rebates for “green” things. I’d be an idiot not to take advantage of things that my taxes help fund, while they are in place, even though I oppose the programs.
The list is wrong about one thing: carbon taxes won’t go to low-income people. They’ll go to the crony capitalists using government policy to manipulate the energy markets so they can prtofit from uneconomic energy schemes like wind and solar. Carbon taxes will make the super-rich even richer, and poor people even poorer. George Soros and Al Gore andJeff Immelt get richer and fatter while Annie Ogwambo in Tanzania has to burn feces to cook her children’s food.
Cliff Mass says:
April 28, 2013 at 2:37 pm
“Tom… I know that a lot of you will not be keen about my analysis of the pause in global warming…”
Not an unreasonable analysis. However, if there is going to be ever increasing AGW and it accelerated since 1950 or so, then, instead of flat periods the same as the 1940-80 one, we should see the signature of warming in the slope of the pause caused by nat variability. Eg, it should be “unusual” that there would be any declining temp (we’ll wait and see) since the warming signal would modify this sufficiently (0.7C of warming in 100 years) to increase the upslope of these “pauses” as we go forward. If there is, in fact, no modification of the pause slope upward, this, to most honest individuals would indicate that there is no AGW of any significance, just the long term upslope of recovery from the little ice age with natural variation bending the curve about the same amount each time. How say you?
Mark Folkestad,
I never blame someone for taking free money. It would be stupid to reject it, no?
You are right, the problem is in the subsidies themselves. Subsidizing inefficiency causes economic problems by the misallocation of resources.
Gary Pearce says:
“If there is, in fact, no modification of the pause slope upward, this, to most honest individuals would indicate that there is no AGW of any significance, just the long term upslope of recovery from the little ice age with natural variation bending the curve about the same amount each time. How say you?”
Cliff Mass’s answer will be interesting. AGW has not caused global warming to accelerate, which would be required if co2 had the claimed effect.
Maybe Thomas Kuhn has a lot to answer for?
Mike Jonas,
Kuhn is an advocate of Post Normal Science [PNS], while Popper is an advocate of deductive logic and the Scientific Method, with testability paramount.
I’ll side with Popper over Kuhn every time.
The Royal Society has belatedly joined hands with Lysenko and what Lysenko spawned.
Gary Pearse says:
April 28, 2013 at 3:05 pm
Exactly. The temperature increase before the latest stall in the 1970-2000 period is almost precisely that between 1910-1940 before the stall (about 0.6 degC), and before CO2 concentration topped 300 ppm.
There is no apparent change in the long-standing pattern which would suggest CO2 in the atmosphere is having any significant effect on temperatures.
If Global Warming Didn’t Exist, It Would Be Necessary to Invent It:
… To lift climatology out of its backwater status …
… To increase research funding for Academia …
… To justify the de facto political empowerment of a sector of the scientific / academic elite, setting a precedent for the subsequent empowerment of other sectors of that elite.*
… To refresh the raison d’être of the EPA & UN …
… To move environmentalism from the fringes to the center of social concern …
… To justify increased media coverage of environmental issues …
… To give enviro-groups a powerful fund-raising and consciousness-raising tool …
… and allow them access to the levers of national and international power …
… To give activist & green parties a vote-getting wedge issue …
… and a case-study justification for their habitual “hammer” (increased regulation and taxation) …
… To provide at-a-loss “engagé/enragé” types with a new stick with which to bash the beastly bourgeoise…
… To transfer wealth from the West to the South …
… To fund alternative energy developers and researchers …
(* See Pareto on “the circulation of the elites.”)
So why not “warm” to global warming, if you’re:
… a climatologist?
… a bigshot in a boffins’ brigade?
… a university administrator?
… an environmentalist?
… an environmental reporter?
… an official of an environmental organization?
… a UN official?
… a socialist?
… a natural-born “true believer”?
… a country in the global South?
… a worker or investor in an alternative energy company?
For such as those, what’s not to like about “climatism”? It’s all upside—a gravy train that’s glory-bound. It would be tempting to get aboard, wouldn’t it? (Especially after others did so, threatening to leave you on The Wrong Side.)
Lysenko wasn’t completely wrong. The trouble is that things are complicated. Genetics does not, by itself, describe everything and it can look like acquired characteristics can be inherited.
The simple, clear, story is almost never reliable. That’s the story people want to hear though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock They would rather listen to James Hansen than to Roger Pielke Sr. or Judith Curry. Hansen, like Lysenko, is a smart guy and knows more about the climate (or plants in Lysenko’s case) than the vast majority of us. Also like Lysenko, he’s not completely wrong. That’s what is so dangerous about those guys. They do have credibility and they tell a simple, clear, story.
Michael Crichton wrote a piece linking Lysenko with pseudo science AGW.
But the main thrust of his article used Eugenics as an example.
Devastating article.Especially when you consider that Arrhenius,was a major proponent of eugenics.
The godfather of the greenhouse gas theory. ,which has “held up for over 120 years”.
Arrhenius who never made a miscalculation, was an Ahole idiot.
http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html
There is nothing new or unusual of Lysenko-ism. Lysenko-ism was there when unnamed and forgotten leaders sentenced Socrates to death for asking questions and raise skepticism on the social norms of that time. It was there when Galileo was sentenced for heresy. Lysenko could take comfort that Lysenko-ism will take another name in the future. Perhaps one of the most important result of the past Lysenko-ism was the separation of science from religion or the establishment. It allowed natural scientists to think, experiment and find the truth with minimal interference from the establishment. One of the biggest drawback to the search for truth in natural science in the last century was the complexity and expense of experimentation and data analysis that natural scientists have to get sponsorship by governments . Naturally, natural science is politicized, corrupted and degraded. It is time to separate natural science from politics in the same way that natural science have separated from religion.
On hindsight it is interesting to note, the successful AGW natural scientists have very strong grasp of the basic principles of social sciences especially politics and mob psychology. The success of “natural scientists” in the AGW would be a very good case study in MBA programs , public policy theories and frameworks, and politics. The anti-AGW scientists could prove the AGW “scientists” 100 per cent wrong but as long as their “scientific results” conform to the core belief of the political establishment, the AGW “scientists” will prevail over the 100 pr cent correct anti-AGW scientists. Politicians dont need the AGW “scientists” to be correct. AGW scientists could be 100 per cent wrong, but they are useful as long as they provide some background for politicians and their followers to expound their core belief and agenda. .The recent economic and social turmoil is a window of opportunity for natural science policy entrepreneurs to change public policy — for a “Chinese wall” to separate politics from natural science even if natural science will have to depend on state funding. The current economic and social turmoil will possibly break the coalition of AGW proponents who have different core beliefs but similar policy objectives.
Well you know what they say about consensus… If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. – George S. Patton