Environmentalism: the new religion?

Environmentalism, the doom and gloom that surrounds the reporting about the imminent demise of the planet by its careless inhabitants, the pontification from those who want to tell the rest of us what we are doing wrong, and the shock and horror that I hear from youngsters, all remind me of a different time, when I was lectured about the same stuff, although then it was not global warming, but rather, global icing, and the horrors of land fills and disposable diapers.

In fact, I even switched to cloth diapers for one of my kids, because I was so concerned about the impending disaster, and wanted to do my share in alleviating the planet's burden.

Then the Chernobyl debacle occurred, and I remember how scared we all were about that. Years before, the incident at Three Mile Island had made a profound impact on the perils of nuclear reactors and nuclear power.

So, it was with great interest and amazement that I just read a couple of not-so-old speeches of Michael Crichton. I did not know much about the man, other than the fact that my kids loved Jurassic Park, and had re-read the story umpteenth times. For anyone who is starting to panic and thinks that the end of the world as we know it is near, I recommend reading his speeches here and here. They are informative, rational, without all the hype, and provide food for thought.

In fact, I was surprised to find out that the Chernobyl disaster, although a tragic event, was not really the global catastrophe it had been depicted. About 50 people died in Chernobyl, which is apparently the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents.

In the final analysis, Crichton equates environmentalism with religion, ascribing it as holding all the incidents of the Judeo-Christian faith: the garden of Eden, a paradise, where man is in a state of grace and unity with nature; falling from grace leads us into a state of pollution, and we are faced with a future day of judgment. As "energy sinners", we are doomed to die, unless we seek salvation -or its modern day equivalent: sustainability.

Now, if environmentalism is the new religion, who are the real prophets and who are the Pharisees?

environmentalism religion Crichton Chernobyl global warming

Chilling comparisons between global warming and bad science.

Rep. John Linder writes in The Washington Times that

"Global Warming" had a precursor in capturing the hearts and minds of the world. Michael Crichton, in his novel "State of Fear," brilliantly juxtaposes the world's current political embrace of "global warming" with the popular embrace of the "science" of eugenics a century ago. For nearly 50 years, from the late 1800s through the first half of the 20th century, there grew a common political acceptance by the world's thinkers, political leaders and media elite that the "science" of eugenics was settled science. There were a few lonely voices trying to be heard in the wilderness in opposition to this bogus science, but they were ridiculed or ignored.

Believers in eugenics argued that we could improve the human race by controlling reproduction. The most respected scientists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other bastions of intellectual rigor retreated to a complex on Long Island named Cold Spring Harbor. Their support came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman fortune working with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and other agencies. The "science" was not lacking important public supporters. Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson were enthusiastic believers. The theory won approval of Supreme Court justices, leaders in higher education and Nobel Prize winners. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was one of the most vocal adherents. She established the first "birth control" clinic in 1916. They believed that "the best" human beings were not having as many children as inferior ones -- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, Blacks, degenerates, the unfit and the "feeble minded." Sanger said "fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty." She spoke of the burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste." H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Roosevelt said, "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind. Twenty-nine states passed laws allowing sterilization. Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were sterilized -- some legally.

The Germans were the most progressive. They had help. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists, one of whom was Josef Mengele. Ultimately the "mental defectives" in Germany were brought to newly built houses where they were interviewed. They were then shown to a back room where they were gassed. Eventually the German program was expanded into a vast network that killed 10 million undesirables. After World War II many of the public dherents to the pseudoscience of eugenics went silent. Colleges removed the textbooks and stopped teaching it.

Michael Crichton gives us yet another example of politicized science:

A second example of politicized science is quite different in character, but it exemplifies the hazard of government ideology controlling the work of science, and of uncritical media promoting false concepts. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a self-promoting peasant who, it was said, "solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizers and minerals." In 1928 he claimed to have invented a procedure called vernalization, by which seeds were moistened and chilled to enhance the later growth of crops. Lysenko's methods never faced a rigorous test, but his claim that his treated seeds passed on their characteristics to the next generation represented a revival of Lamarckian ideas at a time when the rest of the world was embracing Mendelian genetics. Josef Stalin was drawn to Lamarckian ideas, which implied a future unbounded by hereditary constraints; he also wanted improved agricultural production. Lysenko promised both, and became the darling of a Soviet media that was on the lookout for stories about clever peasants who had developed revolutionary procedures.

Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. He was especially skillful at denouncing this opponents. He used questionnaires from farmers to prove that vernalization increased crop yields, and thus avoided any direct tests. Carried on a wave of state-sponsored enthusiasm, his rise was rapid. By 1937, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet. By then, Lysenko and his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was famines that killed millions, and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the firing squads. Lysenko was aggressive in attacking genetics, which was finally banned as "bourgeois pseudoscience" in 1948. There was never any basis for Lysenko's ideas, yet he controlled Soviet research for thirty years. Lysenkoism ended in the 1960s, but Russian biology still has not entirely recovered from that era.
global warming eugenics Crichton

More on the science behind global warming.

Here's an excerpt of what Michael Crichton testified before the United States Senate in September 28, 2005:

...when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. And the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been overwhelmed by competing interests.

Verification may take several forms. I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, which has been the paradigm of medical research since the 1940s.

In that vein, let me tell you a story. It's 1991, I am flying home from Germany, sitting next to a man who is almost in tears, he is so upset. He's a physician involved in an FDA study of a new drug. It's a double-blind study involving four separate teams---one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assesses the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results. This man had been sitting in the Frankfurt airport, innocently chatting with another man, when they discovered to their mutual horror they are on two different teams studying the same drug. They were required to report their encounter to the FDA. And my companion was now waiting to see if the FDA would declare their multi-year, multi-million dollar study invalid because of this chance contact.

For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. In climate science, it's permissible for raw data to be "touched," or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.

global warming climate research

It is essential to always go to the original source of information...

Who hasn't seen this photo these last few days all over the press? But, did you know that the photo was taken in 2004 by Amanda Byrd during an exploration project, and that the photo was captioned "Mother polar bear and cub on interesting ice sculpture carved by waves"?




[global warming]