I was just reviewing a book I read some time ago, The Pseudoscience Wars, by Michael D. Gordin, and from there (apart from the overall thrust of the book) came across the following quote from Julian Huxley*, a British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist:
“… Lysenko and his followers are not scientific in any proper sense of the word – they do not adhere to recognized scientific method, or employee normal scientific precautions, or publish the results in a way which renders their scientific evaluation possible. They move in a different world of ideas from that of professional scientists, and do not carry on discussion in a scientific way.”
Most blog readers here are probably familiar with Trofim Lysenko, a Russian agronomist who promised in the 1930s, when Russian agriculture was in mass crisis, to triple or quadruple crop yields by various techniques either already known and only mildly effective, or not effective at all.
The key to the matter is contained in this sentence from Wikipedia: “Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs.” It is not hard to see from our vantage point that politics had a large hand in the Lysenko affair, and that science was corrupted by it.
In the same manner, our current climate science does not adhere to the scientific method, allow proper evaluation or even exercise mild precautions in its pronouncements. We are given a choice to accept it as handed down to us, or to be called “deniers.” Skeptics are banned from the big media outlets. Could it have been very much different in Stalin’s time? Rather than killing them or sending them to Siberia, we merely fire and de-fund and defame skeptics. So OK. That’s a point.
There was a political agenda behind Lysenko, advancement of the collectivized farming system. There is also a political agenda behind climate alarmism. Some will say it is mere money and power, and I have to tip my cap to those ever-present corrupting temptations. But there is more to it than that – after all, money and power schemes abound in the military, in medicine and health care, in the corporate world in general. Do we really need one more?
As international diplomat Christiana Figueres revealed to the Guardian in 2012,
“What we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that’s going to make the life of everyone on the planet is very different.”
Colorado Senator Tim Wirth was behind the original public hearings on what was then labeled global warming – when they turned off air conditioning and opened the windows in Washington in July of 1988, so that everyone was sweating for TV news. Unlike Figueres, he does not hide behind the mask of science:
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
I just can’t help but think that as with Witch Mania of past centuries, this just isn’t going to end well for anyone on the hand-wringing side. Hopefully the mania will just wear down and die off. Years and decades will go by without any of the gloomy climate predictions coming true. Does that even matter, however? Decades have already gone by. They have been wrong in every prediction, and are still going strong.
The larger question is whether the political agenda in play, the one that Figueres and Wirth talk about above, comes to be. Nothing about the future of our planet or its climate scares me, but those two and so many others do. I am waiting for some real historians to resurrect Stalin and clean him up a bit, but until that is done, I will compare climate alarmism to Lysenkoism, and its proponents to Old Joe. There are monsters among us who want to see very bad things happen, not to our planet, which will be fine, but instead to our civilization.
Maybe the bumper sticker from way back was accurate. They want us to “Freeze in the dark.”
*Is he related to Aldous and Thomas Huxley? Of course. He is their father.
Piece of Mindful 
I remember a made for TV movie during the 70’s I believe it was called Heatwave. It seemed to be filmed in sort of a backroads looking town such as used in Don Johnson’s The Hot Spot. As a kid watching this Heatwave film I remember cinematography sorta blurred by the steam rising from the loose graveled streets. Screen door torn houses resembled shacks with not a person in site other than the occasional warm lemonade glass on table flies buzzing around it left by whoever was seen wiping their sweaty brow with dirty hankerchief. Gas to leave town was nil. The temp needle hovered around 120 degrees with occasional shots of someone’s blistered skin. I don’t recall much else seeing it so long ago. Speaking of A/C I am convinced I am the only one left in this area who still drives around all windows down with music ideally blasting Jean Beauvoir’s Feel The Heat he of Crown of Thorns fame and The Plasmatics which as you know featured former porn star Wendy O. Williams but more likely early Journey with Gregg Rolley Just The Same Way cranked up high just for good measure. I like folks to know sometimes life can still be a party for one for all. And I like folks to see me.
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