I have a history lesson.
"What we've got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
-- Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both." (Steven Schneider, Quoted in Discover, pp. 45-48, Oct. 1989; see also (Dixy Lee Ray in 'Trashing the Planet', 1990) and (American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996).
"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are." (Petr Chylek, Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, commenting on reports that Greenland's glaciers are melting. Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001)
"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect"
(Richard Benedict, US Conservation Foundation)
"We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last!"
-- Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)"
'GLOBAL WARMING' PROTESTERS CALL FOR RESIGNATION OF HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR
May 31, 2006
SILVER SPRING, MD – Hundreds of concerned citizens and leaders from across the nation will join Hurricane Katrina survivors Wednesday to call for the resignation of the heads of the National Hurricane Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....
(A)dvocates will demand that NOAA stop covering up the growing scientific link between severe hurricanes and global warming while insisting on real solutions to the problem of global warming....
Yet, despite a flurry of peer-reviewed scientific studies linking planetary warming to storms like Katrina, leaders at NOAA and the NHC continue to claim that the recent hurricane devastation is part of a "natural cycle."
Don't tell these same people that the sun is at the center of our solar system. They may want other scientists hung for heresy...
In his brilliant 1977 essay, “Asimov’s Corollary,” the great author and biochemist Isaac Asimov wrote:
“If a scientific heresy is ignored or denounced by the general public, there is a chance it may be right. If a scientific heresy is emotionally supported by the general public, it is almost certainly wrong.”
How many times has that statement proven itself to be correct? Consider Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin when evaluating the first sentence; then UFOs, ghosts, Astrology, ESP and other psychic phenomena for the second.
Fortunately, it has been the customary burden of true men of science to maintain stewardship over these truths. Asimov continues:
“It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong….It is those who support ideas for emotional reasons only who can’t change.”
What will become of us in the Orwellian world fashioned by Gore and his PC mercenaries when compromised scientists represent the majority? I shudder to think…….. |
