11.30.2009

Our Piltdown Man

I'm taking a break from tending my fully functional cold fusion reactor -- email me privately and I'll send you plans to build your own (only $29.95!) -- to link to a very good article by Robert Tracinski. Others have done a good job of examining the Climategate scandal, but Tracinski's article goes further and deeper than most by tying many threads together and then clearly stating the political and economic consequences of the giant global warmist scam:

For more than a decade, we've been told that there is a scientific "consensus" that humans are causing global warming, that "the debate is over" and all "legitimate" scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this "consensus" really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money. . .which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Read the whole thing.

Imagine if Piltdown Man had become "settled science" and government thusly directed massive funding of chimp and orangutan research at the expense of human studies in the mistaken thought that it would lead to better medicine. Leaving aside the fact that there should be a separation of government and science, it took more than 40 years for the Piltdown fraud to be exposed. Billions of dollars could have been wasted in that time, and millions of lives lost because of scientific finds left unfound.

It's a strained analogy, I know. But it's difficult to find anything to compare to the massive scale of global warmism and all it comprises. Although I just had the thought that perhaps global warmists aspire to emulate the Catholic church and the Christian cosmology of Galileo's time.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe Michael Crighton compared the theory of man-made global warming to eugenics - a case where cutting edge "science" made its way into the political realm and seriously impacted individual rights.

Anonymous said...

I've always considered that AGW is the modern, large scale industrial equivalent of Lysenkoism in Agriculture in the old Soviet Union. "Science" driven by ideology that results in the deaths of millions.

C. Andrew

C. August said...

Interesting comparison, Andrew. I hadn't thought of Lysenko on this wide of a scale.

Also, I remembered briefly discussing Lysenko somewhere on this blog, and when I did a search I saw it was on a post from April on which you commented too! "Holdren Channels Mr. Burns"