The State of Things

The annual State of the Union Address is, thankfully, over. It was replete with this president’s usual rhetorical assaults on reality.  Especially jarring was his attempt to take credit for “booming energy production,” since the boom occurred on private land in spite of, not because of his policies. He also reiterated his ideology-driven insistence on drastic and economically devastating regulatory measures to “reduce carbon emissions.” 

That the planet goes through cyclical temperature changes is established. In the 1970s, hysteria focused on a coming ice age. Such worthies as the National Academy of Sciences and NASA touted it. Fossil fuels were to blame, then, too. NASA scientists predicted: “In the next 50 years” — or by 2021 — fossil-fuel dust injected by man into the atmosphere “could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees,” resulting in a buildup of “new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.” 

Now a pre-1998 warming trend has elicited the opposite alarm. As WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins recently wrote, “…evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming.” No doubt human activities have an impact, “but how and how much are the critical questions.” And what would be the cost to benefit of the drastic measures urged by the president and the environmental lobby?

What can be established is that temperatures have been static for the last two decades, and the computerized models that predicted accelerating and devastating global warming are flat-out wrong. So much for “the science is settled.” 

So what does Obama’s ideology-driven energy policy mean to ordinary Americans: the ones who don’t add to carbon emissions by jetting to luxury golf courses several times a year.

During a rare moment of candor in 2008 Obama told us. He said his plan to combat climate change would make energy prices “necessarily skyrocket” because “capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations.” He even admitted that the costs would be borne by consumers. But candidate Obama’s knew in 2008, as President Obama knows now, that wind and solar cannot compete with fossil fuels in cost or output without government edicts and taxpayer dollars. The effect of diminished energy supplies and skyrocketing costs on a still limping economy, struggling families and America’s ability to compete in world markets would be disastrous.

As of 2013, the latest figures I could find, the federal government has “invested” $154 billion in failed “renewable energy” technology companies.

All of which reminded this blogger of another ideologically blinkered head-of-state who turned a flawed theory into politically correct science. I did an Internet search to see if anyone else made the connection.  That’s how I found a 4/28/13 Forbes article by Peter Ferrara.

Trofim Lysenko was the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the former Soviet Union. The head–of-state was Joseph Stalin. Stalin conferred that exalted position on Lysenko because Lysenko’s theories were (not accidently) consistent with Marxism. The theories were never experimentally validated.

Ferrara writes:

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…

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.

Lysenkoism set Soviet science back decades, but the Marxism that fueled it had more tragic results. One of these, (they were legion) described in Stephen Kotkin book, Stalin-Volume 1, Paradoxes of Power, was the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The result was the starvation deaths of seven million of Stalin’s own people. Kotkin writes, “Nothing prevented the Communist dictator from embracing private capital,” nothing except his own stubborn intransigence. 

Ferrara posits that the politically correct theory of human-caused, catastrophic, global warming is today’s Lysenkoism:

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 worse and have their motives impugned.

Lawrence Torcello, assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, Ny, provided a particularly noxious example of what Ferrara described. In a recent essay, Torcello stated that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence.”

Dissenting American climate scientists have not been brought up on charges of criminal negligence, but they have been found guilty by leftist academics and their media echo chamber. 

In the face of temperatures that stubbornly refuse to comply with apocalyptic predictions and other inconvenient truths, advocates renamed global warming “climate change.” But now climate change, aka global warming, is having an identity crisis and is being reinvented as “extreme weather” or “climate disruption.”  But no matter how many times names are altered for too obviously conflicting with reality, the hysterical predictions of catastrophe are unlikely to abate.

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?

The entire article by Peter Ferrara can be read at:http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/04/28/the-disgraceful-episode-of-lysenkoism-brings-us-global-warming-theory/