The left's abuse of scientific credentials to affect political ends long predates the so-called SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, going back at least to the earliest days of their efforts to use climate as a tool to effect global political change. "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters. The worst may be yet to come," warned the Washington Post in a front page article on January 11, 1970 entitled "Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age. That's the long long range weather forecast being given out by 'climatologists,' the people who study very long-term world weather trends." The Post saw fit to surround the word climatologists in quotation marks because so few readers would have recognized the emerging field in the 1970s. Half a century later, as climatologists have exerted more and more influence in public life, that particular breed of expert may enjoy greater recognition than any other, reflecting a shift not merely in scientific research, but also in politics.
"Science: Another Ice Age." asked Time Magazine on November 13, 1972. Newsweek covered the "cooling" world on April 28, 1975. Other outlets joined the frenzy as well. Today's global warming alarmists sometimes dismiss the global cooling scare as a media contrivance at odds with the scientific views at the time, but one need only read Newsweek's reporting on the subject to dismiss that dismissal.
Quoting several prominent scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Academy of Sciences, Newsweek painted a bleak picture of Earth's future. "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions," the magazine admitted, "but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Four decades later, malnourishment hit an all-time low even as the world population more than doubled.
The mistaken scientists made political demands along with their scientific predictions. "Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects," Newsweek reported. The scientists proposed stockpiling food and introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies, as well as more ambitious solutions such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot, which would have proved an awkward fix decades later when scientists reversed their judgment, and identified melting ice caps themselves as an irrefutable harbinger of the end times.
Fortunately, citizens of the 1970s had the good sense to ignore the scientists hysterical warnings, which sometimes differed over cause, but always foretold the same effects: famine and death. In addition to predictions of apocalyptically inclement weather, scientists of that era warned that overpopulation would strain the Earth's resources and cause mass starvation. The Stanford biologist, Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb" by declaring the battle to feed all of humanity is over. "In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now, lest any optimists hold out hope that agricultural advances might solve the impending famines." Ehrlich continued, "At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." The dead certain "scientific expert" explained that mankind had only one hope to preserve life: stop it from occurring in the first place. "We must have population control at home. hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail," Ehrlich demanded, decrying the "cancer of population growth," which he insisted must be cut out as a rule.
People who describe newborn babies as a "cancer" tend to have a distorted vision of the world, but prominent leftists whose vision had already been similarly distorted, lapped up Ehrlich's expertise. Johnny Carson invited him on "The Tonight Show" after which his book "The Population Bomb" shot up the best seller lists. India's leftist prime minister, Indira Gandhi soon after began enforcing policies that required sterilization in order to access water electricity, ration cards, and medical care. Communist China embraced the "One Child Policy," which led to upwards of 100 million forced abortions and sterilizations.
Despite these atrocities, the world population continued to grow, but world hunger declined. Ehrlich had been perfectly wrong. Not only had his doomsday prophecy failed to materialize, but the greatest cause of mass death in the subsequent decades was the coerced abortions that his book inspired. Yet Ehrlich never paid a price for his fatally false predictions. He continued to teach at Stanford University, prestigious institutions continued to laud him with honors, and Ehrlich remained unrepentant, never failing to warn of overpopulation, as he continued his crusade against human life.
Leftist radicals made use of Ehrlich in their Zeal to promote contraception and abortion, both of which undermined the old moral standards but their agenda never depended upon the accuracy of his scientific views. The expert turned out to be scientifically wrong, but he was always politically correct. Left-wing billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, George Soros, and Mike Bloomberg continue to promote fears of overpopulation, describing the imaginary scourge as the world's most pressing problem, during a secret meeting that was leaked to the press in 2009.
As the "irrefutable scientific fact" of global cooling morphed into the irrefutable scientific fact of global warming during the 1980s and 90s, left-wing politicians incorporated Ehrlich's Malthusian musings into their new doomsday theory. In his 1992 book, "Earth in The Balance," Senator Al Gore asserted: "No goal is more crucial to healing the global environment than stabilizing human population."
In 1997, Vice President Gore repeated this claim during a White House conference on global warming. While industrialized nations had "stabilized" their birth rates, Gore contended, through contraceptives and abortion, poorer countries in Africa and Asia had continued to have babies at "unacceptably high rates." So, Gore proposed a global "Marshall Plan" to kill those poor brown babies in the womb through contaceptives, abortion, and vaccine-based sterilants in order to prevent their conception in the first place. By subsidizing initiatives in poor countries.
Al Gore continued to promote population control into the 20 teens. During a speech to a New York audience in 2011, Gore disguised his advocacy of aborting African babies as "fertility management and educating and "empowering girls and women," but even the liberal Los Angeles Times admitted that these euphemisms served only to make the touchy topic of population control more palatable. In 2019, during his second bid for president, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders called for similar measures in poor countries. "Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact," claimed a supposed "audience member" at CNN's Climate Change Town Hall. "Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address the climate catastrophe," she asked.
Introducing a new degree of hysteria to the allegedly "scientific" issue that began as global cooling before reversing into global warming, then morphing into climate change, and now finally attaining the dramatic epithet "catastrophe." The answer is "yes," affirmed Bernie, who had already endorsed the Green New Deal and a 93 trillion-dollar proposal by Socialist politician, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to upend American society in the name of saving the planet. Ocasio-Cortez used apocalyptic environmental theories to justify the legislation, but her plan extended far beyond environmental measures. In a Green New Deal Fact Sheet AOC explained that the GND would guarantee the right to a job with a family sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security, high quality education, including higher education and trade schools, healthy food, high quality health care, safe affordable, adequate housing, and economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.
The Freshman Congressman soon removed the outline from her Web site, recognizing perhaps that a guaranteed income for deadbeats might not play in Peoria. But the formal house resolution on the Green New Deal did not significantly depart from the deleted FAQ page. It preserved "Universal Entitlements" to high quality health care, affordable, safe and adequate housing, and economic security, as well as revolutionary plans to upgrade all existing buildings in the United States. It promised to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, and other allegedly aggrieved groups, without ever specifying how these people had been oppressed, and what exactly their oppression had to do with global warming, or global cooling, climate change, climate catastrophe, or whichever jargon the radicals preferred that week.
No matter what the latest science is and however much it may contradict the previous science, it seems always to require that we breed less, eat less, move less, and dispute less. We must always do the opposite of whatever we have done in the past. The Earth may be heating up or cooling down, or deceitfully appearing to stay the same, but whatever the weather, the radicals demand we cede more control to experts, provided of course that those experts tow the party line.
The sudden popularity of the phrase "scientific consensus" shows how thoroughly political correctness has inverted intellectual life. The phrase rarely, if ever, appeared in literature scientific or otherwise before the 1970s. After a brief dip in popularity during the Reagan Era, it skyrocketed in use during the 1990s and 2000s. The new phrase reflected a new politically correct understanding of both politics and science.
Politics, once conducted through Republican government and consensus, increasingly outsourced rule over the people to purportedly apolitical experts. Meanwhile, scientific inquiry, once undertaken by clinical experts, began to rely on popular support for legitimacy. For decades, alarmists have defended their prophecies of Earth's imminent destruction by noting that 97 percent of scientists agree with their doomsday views. NASA makes this claim almost verbatim in the first sentence of an article entitled "Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming." The space agency asserts multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals showed that 97 or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree climate warming trends over the past century are "extremely likely due to human activities."
As the conservative Heartland Institute observed in its 2015 analysis Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming," NASA cited four surveys to arrive at the famous 97 figure, but a closer look at those reports reveals that the alleged consensus rests on shaky scientific ground. The space agency cites historian Naomi Oreskis, who in turn cites abstracts of scientific papers, many of which either begin with the premise of catastrophic man-made global warming, or else mention it only in passing. NASA then cites John Cook, a professor of Cognitive Science, better known for his blogs than his scholarly publications, who claims to have discovered 97.1 percent agreement on catastrophic warming among scientists. But a paper published in "Science and Education" debunked that statistic, finding instead that just one percent of papers addressing that issue, and just 0.3 percent of papers consulted overall, endorsed that hypothesis. A third study by Maggie Zimmerman consisted of a two-minute online survey sent to 10,000 random scientists, three thousand of whom responded. Zimmerman ignored responses from scientists whose fields of study might lead them to conclude that the Sun (the primary driver of Earth's climate), rather than human activity, had caused the warming. A fourth study from William Andareg presumes that all scientists who had not explicitly refuted the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had thereby endorsed the body's extreme conclusions.
Regardless of how and why the mercury in the thermometer rises or falls, alarmist and skeptic alike must admit the political nature of the debate, which from the beginning, has revolved around appeals to popular consensus by governmental bodies who always seem to reach the same policy conclusions, no matter what the data show. Conservatives have generally attempted to refute their opponent's pseudo-scientific arguments on scientific rounds. When leftists base their power grabs on supposedly catastrophic global warming, Conservatives can test the temperature. When the radicals rely on the China virus to justify their political demands Conservatives debate The lethality of the epidemic and the effectiveness of the recommended health measures. But, while the left's dubious scientific claims may indeed merit such skepticism, Conservatives give away the game when they quibble over scientific data, an approach that grants their opponents even more dubious political premises. When Conservatives attack the Green New Deal on the grounds that the Earth hasn't really gotten warmer, they tacitly accept the notion that warming, if it really existed, would warrant the radical plan. By disparaging coronavirus lockdowns on the grounds that 99.7 percent of people infected with the virus survive, they grant that a lower rate of survival would merit the unprecedented upheaval of our political system.
Even after Decades of politically correct chicanery there remains an alternative to this lose-lose scenario--the defense of the established political order of our nation. Perhaps warmer weather threatens civilization. Perhaps it does not. Maybe the coronavirus poses an unprecedented threat to human life. Maybe not. In any event, doctor dictators and expert technocrats have no right to demand that we acquiesce to their every whim. A free people may welcome the advice of specialists, but we must also consider other non-scientific factors including the effects of a given policy on the economy, national security, culture, civil rights, social relations, and a myriad of other facets of our Republic. Even if climate change really could destroy the world by 2031, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims, or even by 2021 (a date which has come and gone uneventfully), as Britain's King Charles so wrongly claimed, science remains the handmaiden of philosophy, and in a Constitutional Republic such as ours, the people must set the nation's course, not a handful of scientists who are cherrypicked by leftist radicals.
The leftist radicals of the 1960s did not demand deference to the proclamations of scientific experts. On the contrary, they attempted to undermine the authority of the establishment by questioning all received scientific opinion. As the arch hippie Timothy Leary put it, "Think for yourself, and question authority." From the 1920s through the 1980s, radicals questioned, and thereby subverted, virtually every established standard in religion, sex, education, behavior, dress, and politics, primarily by forcing new standards of speech on the rest society. During those Decades of radical progress Conservatives failed to defend established authority and many did not even try, preferring the new culture of openness to the old rigidities.
By the 20 teens, the new anti-standard of political correctness had pervaded all aspects of life. Even the allegedly apolitical field of scientific research could not resist the new politically correct rules. Cultural revolutionaries had brought to heal science itself, which they subsequently invoked to legitimize their ideological claims. A movement that undertook the ruthless criticism of all that exists had turned even established authority to its own ends. The leftist radicals had not only undermined the old order, they actually replaced it.
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