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Suborning the Scientists

by Christopher Chantrill
December 01, 2003 at 3:00 am

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I WAS LOOKING through my mother’s bookshelf over Thanksgiving sampling the many volumes she has about climate change.  Back in 1980, for instance, she got Our Turbulent Sun, by Kendrick Frazier, which discusses the importance of determining whether the “solar constant” or energy output of the sun is in fact constant or variable.  The answer is: variable, at least in the short term.

More recently, she has acquired some books by Brian Fagan with titles like Floods, Famines and Emperors, a popular work about the devastation wreaked by El Niño, and The Little Ice Age, about the climatic cooling that occurred in the middle of the last millennium.

There is a significant difference in outlook between books published in the 1980s and 1990s.  No modern book is complete without a stern warning about the dangers of global warming.  That is odd, you might think, in a book about El Niño in which the proudest principalities and powers are shown as helpless before the might of natural forces.

The paradox disappears when you remember that global warming has been a godsend to the scientists. When a politician like Al Gore writes a book called Earth in the Balance that advertises that we are all done for unless by submit to strong and principled political leadership on the environmental front, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is gold in them there hills.  So now every popular science book has a final chapter that ties it all into global warming, and our wasteful ways with the sacred earth.

But I just don’t get it. The modest research that I have conducted into the climate sciences leads me to believe that the big problem we have right now is Ice Ages.  Although, as Daniel Botkin writes in Discordant Harmonies, the climate of the earth is variable in all time scales, there is no disputing the fact that the climate of the past few million years has been glacial with the occasional “interglacial period” that tends to last about 10,000 years.  Right now, it’s about 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age.

You would think that politicians and scientists would be cudgeling their brains to figure out the mechanism that plunges the earth into an ice age (and, by all accounts, it seems to happen quite suddenly).  But you would be wrong.  Instead, they are focused like a laser on elucidating the mechanism of global warming, with a militant faith that it is all due to human greed in the century since the dawn of the Industrial Age.  Now that God has died for our elites and sin with Him, the best and the brightest seem determined to smuggle sin in the back door with the help of the climate sciences.

Now that conservatives have control the Congress and the Presidency, it is time to do something about this.

For years, the liberals showered the scientists with money, and the scientists showered the liberals with studies showing exactly what the liberals wanted.  More government.  More power for the welfare state.  Of course, the scientists always qualified their results; at the end of all their books they were careful to note that more research was needed.  But meanwhile, enough was known for the Supreme Court to ban segregated schools, or mandate busing.  Or validate abortion on demand.  Or ending the death penalty.  It’s time to put a stop to it.

But won’t the scientists object?  Well yes, they probably will, but in the end they will go with the money.  Andrew Carnegie proved this a century ago with his plan to award free pensions to college professors.  There was one minor condition, that the colleges should sever their ties with any sectarian institution.  Most colleges hardly blinked as they amended their constitutions to abjure and deny their religious affiliation.  You probably know the residual legatee of Carnegie’s largess.  It’s called TIAA/CREF.

Then there were the physicists.  They had a grand old time fainting away like Victorian debutantes in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists while the government drenched them in filthy lucre to develop the science behind nuclear weapons.

It’s time for Republicans to flex their muscles.  We need an Ice Age Initiative, and we’ll turn around the scientists from their global warming enthusiasm in the time it takes to write a grant proposal.  After all, there is so much more research that needs to be done.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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