Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 03/03/2010 2:51:16 PM PST by canuck_conservative
On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.....
Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.....
Histories of science contain an account of the ideological control of Soviet biology during the mid-20th century by plant scientist Trofim Lysenko, who by 1940 had risen to be Director of the influential Institute of Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lysenko and his supporters rejected the "dangerous Western concepts" of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution. They preferred the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; for instance, that cows could be trained to give more milk and their offspring would then inherit this trait.
Whilst this was not an unreasonable hypothesis to erect in the early 19th century, by the 1930s the idea had been tested in many ways and was known to be wrong. Requiring its application to agricultural and allied biological research in the USSR was disastrous, not least in the vicious persecution of scientists that took place, and the legacy of this sad episode still disadvantages Soviet biology today.
Lysenkoism grew from four main roots:
* a necessity to demonstrate the practical relevance of science to the needs of society; * the amassing of evidence to show the "correctness" of the concept as a substitute for causal proof; * noble cause corruption, whereby data are manipulated to support a cause which is seen as a higher truth; and * ideological zeal, such that dissidents are silenced as "enemies of the truth".
The first of these roots has been strongly represented in Australian government attitudes to the funding of science as far back as the 1980s. The remaining three roots exemplify closely the techniques that are currently used by global warming alarmists in pursuit of their aims – as recently exposed for all to see by the Climategate and IPCCgate scandals.
Lysenkoism damaged mainly Soviet science and society, whereas Hansenism has now been exerting its pernicious influence worldwide for more than twenty years. The climate alarmism involved has long been undermining the precious public trust from which science draws its traditional influence and sustenance, and now Climategate has opened up new sinkholes all over the place.
Hansenist climate alarmism has also damaged the standing of many leading science journals and science organizations, which have replaced their formerly careful editorial and organizational balance with environmental alarmism and naked global warming advocacy.
Future historians of science are likely to judge the 1988-2009 frenzy of climate change alarmism as even more damaging than Lysenkoism, because of the distrust that collapse of the global warming paradigm has already inculcated about using science to inform modern policy making.
Instead of exercising the leadership that is desperately needed to correct this, and to restore public faith in science and scientists.....
"ABC gags Bob Carter"
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/03/abc-gags-bob-carter
That is a brilliant analogy.
Lysenkoism permeates all of our sciences these days. Every additional day that the left infiltrates it’s cohorts and hires like minds in academia and research brings science one step closer to being completely stifled. Unfortunately this a process going on throughout the west where incompetent ignorants are promoted for the sake of advancing an ideology.
*PING*
:’) Thanks ApplegateRanch.
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