Lysenkoism and Global Warming Theory

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.

Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

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.

I stumbled into this… no sensitivity debate: http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-pause-in-global-warming-what-does.html

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

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. 🙂

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 Royal Society has belatedly joined hands with Lysenko and what Lysenko spawned.

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

Well you know what they say about consensus… If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. – George S. Patton

@Cliff Mass says:
April 28, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Sorry Cliff,
If you want to have a serious and honest debate about global warming, you don’t start off by showing the scariest possible graph you can find, and then using it as a basis for the rest of your article. You do know that that graph has undergone many adjustments (each one scarier than the last) over the last number of years. Just over ten years ago, it had 1998 level with 1940, and no other temperature reconstruction, and particularly the most comprehensive ones we have, the satellites, agree with it.
The AMO cycle that you mention has only just come down from its peak and will continue on to its trough for maybe another thirty years, after which it will migrate northwards again, and warm things up a bit again. This century, we will have two cooling phases and one warm, so that by the end of it, temperatures will be pretty much where they were at the start.
Despite increasing emissions of CO2 by humans, CO2 levels in the atmosphere haven’t accelerated in line with those increasing emissions, something you would expect in a world where human emissions are being blamed for all of the rise. Either something else is at play, or humans are not responsible for all of the rise, or both.
And this is without factoring in the quiet sun. Whether this is going to lead to a Dalton or Maunder style minimum remains to be seen, but if it does, then expect to see lots of predictions of a new imminent Ice Age in fifteen years or so. Even though TSI has not precipitously dropped, UV radiation has, and it would appear, this matters.
I would have an easier time believing that humans are having an effect on the planet if it weren’t for the fact that our total energy output amounts to less than a second of sunlight (at the surface) per day. If our energy output isn’t doing it, then it makes it very hard for anything else we do to be having much of an effect.

Manifestly junk hypotheses (“science” is the wrong word) go back to Aristotle’s “Physics” with its truly asinine notions of “impetus” which drove Galileo to distraction. Phlogiston et al. aside, “junk science” as a real-true organic brain-disease includes, but is not limited to, Rene Blondlot; J.B. Rhine; Immanuel Velikovsky; and –but, yes– Trofim Lysenko, whose New Soviet Man invoked anti-Mendelian tenets worthy of National Socialists’ “Aryan Superman.”
Like Anabaptists of Munster featured in William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”, your garden-variety AGW Catastrophist is (let’s face it) no more concerned with “science” as an objective, rational endeavor than were ghost-hunting Spiritualists infesting the British Society for Psychical Research from c. 1890 – 1910. Ever and always, “global warming” is but a peculiarly self-destructive, even vicious, propaganda exercise, designed by rent-seeking ideologues solely to advance their crude, vulgar, ineffably anti-Enlightenment agenda.
Anyone unfamiliar with such names as Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, hastens to board a cattle-car to their One World Government’s gulag archipelago. Insular and officious Green Gangsters like Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. who “know too much” will be among the first to board that train.

What we need is a mission to send astronauts to Mars. The GI Bill was introduced because it was known there would be problems arising from all the returning soldiers at the end of WW2. They’d need training, jobs, incomes, and futures. I wonder if it’s more than coincidence that the global warming meme got going right around the time that the light began to dim at NASA. I remember all the people who thought the space program was draining societal resources from more imperative needs. So, instead we got the scientific pathology of global warming to ultimately drain even more resources. Perhaps a trip to Mars could be a GI Bill for the scientific community. While it might be astoundingly expensive, would it really be more expensive than the gazillions that would be wasted on useless climate research and even more useless mitigation policies? And, at least it wouldn’t do any damage to personal freedoms. For the end of the world types we could claim that the Mars mission would have the side benefit of spawning technology that would protect their children and grandchildren from asteroid hits. For Obama we could put a really big photograph on Mars that people could see with their telescopes. For Middle-Easterners we could claim Mars as a Sharia zone. For the greens we could put a couple windmills and solar panels on it so the trip would be ecologically responsible. In the end I’d say it’s our last hope to divert people to a grand project where they can’t really cause any harm. And we’ve already got the nuclear rocket engines for it. They were successfully test fired in the Nevada desert way back in the late 1960s.

I’d also like to see Piltdown Man revisited, showing the appeals to authority, the legitimate discovereries elsewhere that were ignored (e.g. Raymond Dart’s 1924 fossil), the refusal of the authorities to allow a proper examination of the evidence. That sounds so familiar.
I see the Royal Society claim to have not been involved at the time:
http://blogs.royalsociety.org/history-of-science/2013/02/04/piltdown-man/

The Pompous Git says:
April 28, 2013 at 12:58 pm
“Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?
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.”
I hope that you are correct but I doubt it. Could you give us the details on the texts and how widely they are used.
Every American public college has a “Diversity Dean” whose growing powers have come to include a “Green Office” over the last few years. That is indoctrination, no? Are you sure that there are not a flood of courses with “Green” in the title, courses that supplement the older curriculum?

Theo Goodwin said @ April 28, 2013 at 7:47 pm

I hope that you are correct but I doubt it. Could you give us the details on the texts and how widely they are used.
Every American public college has a “Diversity Dean” whose growing powers have come to include a “Green Office” over the last few years. That is indoctrination, no? Are you sure that there are not a flood of courses with “Green” in the title, courses that supplement the older curriculum?

Dunno too much about American colleges since I have never attended one; I live in southern Tasmania. A decade ago I took a first year geology course as part of a degree in philosophy of science. A goodly portion of the course dealt with climate and how it has changed as a result of changing biology, continental configuration etc. The introductory text, Changing Earth by Monro & Wicander contained several references to the fact that there was an anthropegenic global warming theory while also mentioning that “many scientists are not convinced that the global warming trend is the result of of increased human activity related to industrialization”. It also suggest that the students discuss the effect of reducing emissions would have on our standard of living and the global economy. It’s an American text dated 2001. Most of the discussion of climate is the Received View of the 1980s (pre-Hansen).
It’s worth noting that tertiary level science texts contain information that is reasonably certain — not consensus science, but widely agreed science. It seems to take about 20 years for so-called breakthroughs to make it into those texts. Example: Margulis’ theory of eukaryotic organelles was outrageous when I was undertaking first year biology in 1969, but is quite uncontroversial these days and was mentioned in the alternate 1st year geology text along with the effect of phytoplankton’s DMS emissions affecting cloud formation.
As I said, I can’t find a serious consideration of CAGW in any of the tertiary level textbooks I have to hand, even though such might well be expected given that it’s now more than twenty years since I was interviewed on ABC Radio National for my opinion on the matter. Don’t ask what I said BTW; I’m certain it was complete and utter codswallop. But it did reignite my interest in climatology, particularly the paleo sort.

Lloyd Martin Hendaye said @ April 28, 2013 at 6:21 pm

Manifestly junk hypotheses (“science” is the wrong word) go back to Aristotle’s “Physics” with its truly asinine notions of “impetus” which drove Galileo to distraction.

Aristotle created the first written records of significant biological observations concerning marine organisms. He lived between 384 & 322 BC and was asininely oblivious to the d8iscoveries that would be made 2,000 years after his death. He was of Plato’s most famous student. Plato considered intuition as the basis of knowledge. Aristotle disagreed as he believed that accurate observation and description of nature, inductive reasoning and interpretation, were the only way to advance our understanding of the natural world. Now how asinine is that?
Aristotle’s greatest contribution to science was his approach; the forerunner of the modern scientific method. Conspicuously, Aristotle had no real teachers, predecessors, or body of scientific knowledge to build on. He was the first (that we know of) to begin such studies, thus rightly earning the title “Father of Natural History”.

I found no basis prepared; no models to copy… Mine is the first step, and therefore a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labor. It must be looked at as a first step and judged with indulgence.

Aristotle made many significant contributions to oceanography and marine biology. He regarded the earth as a sphere because of the shadow cast by the earth during eclipses and the gradual disappearance of ships over the horizon. Aristotle described and named 24 species of crustaceans and annelid worms, 40 species of molluscs and echinoderms, and 116 species of fish (all from the Aegean Sea). He recognized cetaceans (dolphins, whales, etc.) as mammals, and correctly described many groups of vertebrates as oviparous or viviparous. When we use the word “species”, we are using the word Aristotle used for that purpose for probably the very first time.
And that’s without considering Aristotle being the first to codify logic! Asinine? ‘Tis you Lloyd Martin Hendaye that is asinine to calumniiate the greatest thinker of the last several millennia.

RACookPE1978 said @ April 29, 2013 at 12:42 am

If Aristotle had failures and flaws, I would point out that perhaps the most important was that he did not create a day-to-day practice or a tradition of “testing and experimentation” AGAINST “consensus thought”.

I rather thought Aristotle went against the consensus of his day. Plato and his followers claimed that empirical observation was unreliable; Aristotle believed empirical observation was of primary importance. Yes, it was somewhat remiss of him to fail to invent processes that took the rest of humanity 2,000 years to discover, but that’s the way things turned out. And of course he was to blame for his words to be turned into dogma 1,400 years after his death. Shameless of him really!
BTW, if you believe logic to be so flawed, how come you are using a computer?

richardscourtney says:
April 29, 2013 at 12:34 am
BCBill:
re your excuses for Trofim Lysenko …

Neither BCBill nor I are making excuses for Lysenko. What we’re both pointing out is that things are complicated. Snorting and fuming and getting sanctimonious isn’t really advancing the cause.

richardscourtney says:
April 29, 2013 at 4:15 am
commieBob:
I am replying to your offensive comment at April 29, 2013 at 3:20 am

Your post was not factual in that neither BCBill nor I were making excuses for Lysenko. Things are complicated and history really is in the eyes of the beholder. The best people of good will can do is look at the issue from all sides to try and figure out what really happened. Trying to examine and discover reasons is not the same as making excuses.

Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award.

Mmmmm. Let’s try and bring that up to the modern era.

Scientists who promoted CAGW with faked data and ignored counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award.

$millions to Mann, Nobel Prizes, exotic jaunts, speaking circuits, new super doopa computers, media interviews, delete emails………………………

f you’re defining Lysenkoism simply as big brother interfering in science then I guess you could really claim that almost any scientific theory is Lysenkoism. Cell theory? Supported by gub’mint. Evolution? Definitely supported by gub’mint. Using this broad net of “money-grubbing scientists” we can choose to disbelieve in nearly anything. It’s a weak and awful argument, and it weakens the position of this website to post it as anything other than an example of what not to do.

richardscourtney says:
April 29, 2013 at 5:07 am
“There was a tiny kernel of truth in Lysenko’s ideas.
The little truth was exaggerated to become lies.
The lies were used as excuses for political policies.
The political policies killed millions.
Lysenko supported the political policies.
There is a tiny kernel of truth in the AGW-hypothesis.
That little truth has been exaggerated to become lies.
The lies are being used as excuses for political policies.
The political policies would kill billions if fully enacted.
AGW-supporters promote the political policies.”
Ryan says:
April 29, 2013 at 6:20 am
Governments can encourage science or governments can hijack science to their own ends.
Read what Richardscourney has posted. Do you still not see a dangerous parrallel between Lysenkoism and todays AGW theory.
Open your eyes man.

Lysenkoism and AGW catastrophism both originated more in politics than science, but actually, the inheritance of acquired characteristics in plants was demonstrated by Barbara Mcclintock, and she received the Nobel prize in 1983 after she had to endure the usual bad treatment from the orthodoxy.
There is also increasing evidence that it applies in animals, too. Check out Prof. Denis Noble’s site http://musicoflife.co.uk/ for a video lecture and a nice PDF covering the topic.

But it was a great scam while it lasted.
Progressive;”Forward”.
The hydra will pop up new heads, fresh water, flu pandemics and patriotism are all being developed.
Agenda 21 is openly admitted by the UN, so what of those who claimed we were conspiracy fools?
What gets rewarded will continue and grow.
Our bureaucracies and politicians will continue to lie, steal and destroy, until we stop them.
Incompetence, arrogance and idiocy are the norm within the bureaus of our nations.
Promote the clueless and dangerously useless is common practice of government.
When was a thief, corrupt practitioner or liar punished?
In Canada, a corrupt political party stole over $40 million, yet no one is in gaol.
And this is clump change, from the politicians POV, a mere crumb of what our governments waste, destroy and disappear.

What a hoot–nonsense from the heartland institute is published in Forbes Magazine. No wonder that Forbes is going downhill. Lysenko is clearly anti-science. Heartland is the US version of Lysenko.
REPLY: Bill does your state funded university (ipfw.edu) teach you this rubbish, or did you come up with this revelation on your own? – Anthony

The comment threads in this and the previous WUWT article have been … interesting. And somewhat distressing. Since the change in the WUWT comments process, it seems that the discussions are becoming more rapid and more personal. They appear to me to be taking on more aspects of the flamewars that make so many other internet forums unreadable.
I suspect (but can not yet prove) that this change in tone is the result of the instant posting of comments. The old moderation was slow and while that delay had some disadvantages, it seemed to me to add time for reflection. Misunderstandings and even harsh words were still exchanged but the debates did not seem quite so quick to decay into personal attacks and recriminations.
Am I viewing the old process through my own rose-colored glasses or are others seeing the same change in tone?

Good evening, Caleb. Yeah, I wondered after submitting that comment how much of the tone was the result of the rapid comments and how much (if any) was psychological priming based on the topic. And for the record, I am okay with a “robust” discussion as long as I can learn from it. That generally stops when the thread devolves into personal attacks. I found no complaints with your comments but some of the others were … less illuminating, shall we say.

CO2 Is, without question, capable of absorbing infra red radiation that would otherwise leave the earth. CO2 is also the source of 100% of the food we eat. There are credible studies, that were done prior to the politicization of this issue that predicted a near-doubling of agricultural productivity with a doubling of CO2 concentration.
Any discussion that attempts to quantify the societal loss resulting from the burning of carbon does not take both the positive and the negative impact into account is simply not science. It is propaganda. The last century provides some vivid lessons as to the results of policies based upon propaganda. How many people did Lysenko kill? If Lysenko were alive today, where would he be working?