Climate, absurdities, and the Democrats

Four historical episodes are summarized in which a majority of scientists in a particular specialty supported false and even absurd theories. The theories that received government backing persisted decades longer than they otherwise would have and in three out of the four cases cited led to atrocities. US eugenics especially comes to mind. It encouraged the worst atrocity of the 20th century.

by Richard Schulman

Voltaire famously said, “Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Since the 1990s, the Democratic Party and the many organizations it has brought under its fold have been trying to persuade the American public of absurdities concerning the climate.

Although the Democratic Party has not itself committed atrocities yet, it has facilitated several. President Joseph Biden has just shamefully abandoned Americans and American employees to the fanatical and murderous Taliban in Afghanistan. Former President William Clinton shamefully stood by as hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were butchered in Rwanda. He and his administration were, as The Atlantic wrote, “Bystanders to Genocide.”

The Democratic Party’s thirty-year campaign of lies that there is a climate crisis caused by the combustion of the fossil-fuels will cause even greater atrocities if not stopped. The Party’s attempt to frog march the US and other economies to abandon fossil fuels for unreliable, low-density wind and solar power — and spend trillions of dollars on subsidies in so doing – will wreck the US economy, plunge much of its population and that of other advanced countries into poverty, and spread starvation, disease, unemployment, and war to the developing sector.

The Democratic absurdity from which all the others descend is that scientific truth is determined by majorities of scientists.

Majorities of scientists have often been wrong, sometimes tragically, especially when mistakes were backed by the money and the coercive powers of government. There have been many episodes in the history of science where a majority of scientists have believed one thing, while a minority, often small, have dissented. The minority were reviled and ostracized for their dissent, only to ultimately turn out to have been right.

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, the worst of these episodes have had a common feature: government coming down hard on the side of the false theory. When this happens, science is set back for decades and atrocities have often ensued. We discuss four such episodes below.

1. Lysenko

Lysenkoism is one example of government-supported quack science that led to tragedy on a giant scale. Trofim Lysenko believed that environment alone determined plant and animal outcomes, not genetics. To Stalin, the Soviet Union’s Communist leader, Lysenko’s ideas were in accord with Soviet doctrine that the state was creating the environment that would give birth to the new Soviet man, who would selflessly toil for the advancement of the state rather than his own and his family’s needs. Stalin put Lysenko in charge of Soviet biology and agriculture. Biological science as it was developed in the West was suppressed by Lysenko, not to recover for many decades.

After being charged with recovering Soviet agriculture after Stalin’s collectivization program, in which millions of Ukrainians starved or were murdered by the Communists, Lysenko made the situation worse. According to an article in The Atlantic:

“Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history… Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, for instance, since according to his ‘law of the life of the species,’ plants from the same ‘class’ never compete with one another. He also forbade all use of fertilizers and pesticides. Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to Lysenko’s methods died or rotted.… Communist China adopted his methods in the late 1950s and endured even bigger famines. Peasants were reduced to eating tree bark and bird droppings and the occasional family member. At least 30 million died of starvation. Because he enjoyed Stalin’s support, Lysenko’s failures did nothing to diminish his power within the Soviet Union.”

But such atrocities stemming from bad science backed by government couldn’t happen in the US, readers will object. Oh yes it can — and did – in at least three instances. The first case, the rejection of the ideas of Alfred Wegener by an overwhelming majority of US scientists for half a century, merely made US geological science an object of international ridicule. No atrocities ensued. But in the other two cases, eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis study, US government promotion of absurd scientific theory did lead to atrocities. Let’s take up the Wegener episode first.

2. US geologists’ opposition to Wegener

Beginning in 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, announced and subsequently developed the theory of continental drift. Wegener’s work presented many of the ideas that were to become the core of plate tectonic theory, a theory which revolutionized the study of the earth sciences and is as fundamental to those sciences as evolution and genetics are to biology. But while Wegener’s theory of continental drift garnered increasing support from geologists in Europe and South Africa, his ideas were pilloried and ostracized by US geologists for an astonishing half century.

Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes, author of The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, writes that “[A]t Harvard in the late 1930s, continental drift was discussed only ‘on the back stairs’,” and Stephen Jay Gould “recounted how at Columbia in the 1950s advocates of drift were publicly ridiculed.”

Many of the US geologists who rejected continental drift were either employees or received research funding from the US Geological Survey or the quasi-governmental Carnegie Institution headquartered in Washington, DC. While Oreskes attributes US geologists’ opposition to Wegener to a narrow-positivist methodological bias – no grand theorizing, just keep your nose down close to the rocks and humbly suggest only small-ball generalizations – Wegener’s biographer, Mott T. Greene, notes the widespread anti-German bias in the US during the 1920s and 1930s. This was cultivated by the Woodrow Wilson administration during World War I to motivate hatred against Germany, and the hostility persisted after the war. The German language ceased to be taught in most US schools. Oreskes also notes the destructive role that the “expert” opinion of Lord Kelvin played in holding back geology, e.g., his dogmatic assertion as to the age of the earth (a claim one hundredfold too low) and his false belief that the earth was entirely solid.

But the humiliation of US geology in the Wegener case pales by comparison with the harm and atrocities wrought by the US genetics community and US government in endorsing eugenics.

3. Eugenics

We summarize the eugenics story as told in another study by Mrs. Oreskes, Why Trust Science? In the US, Oreskes writes,

“[E]ugenic practices included the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of US citizens (and principally targeting the disabled), a practice upheld in the Buck v. Bell decision, wherein Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., upheld the rights of states to ‘protect’ themselves from ‘vicious protoplasm.’” This is the case in which Holmes notoriously said that ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’

Thirty-two US states “passed sterilization laws, and at least thirty thousand US citizens were sterilized, mostly without informed consent and sometimes without their knowledge.” Woodrow Wilson, progressive Democratic governor of New Jersey, signed on behalf of his state.

“[C]onservationist Madison Grant, a founder of the Save-the-Redwoods League, trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, [was the] author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). This was the Nordic ‘race’ – what we might now call white Anglo-Saxons – which Grant believed was threatened by the weaker ‘races’ of Jews, southern Europeans, and Negroes. These latter groups, he argued, should be isolated in ghettos and prevented from interbreeding with men and women of northern European descent. Grant’s arguments played a role in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe… and completely eliminated immigration from Asia. Stephen Jay Gould characterized The Passing of the Great Race as the most influential work of scientific racism ever published in America; historian Jonathan Spiro notes that it was widely embraced in Nazi Germany, including by Hitler, who wrote to Grant saying, ‘The book is my Bible.’

“At Nuremberg,” Oreskes adds, “one proffered defense was that Nazi laws were based on what Americans had advocated.” Indeed, the hundred million humans slaughtered in World War II were ultimately the victims of eugenic theories promoted by US progressive scientists and the US government.

But there is one more chapter in this sordid history of the absurdities held for a period by US scientists backed by government power: the Tuskegee syphilis study.

4. Tuskegee

We quote from the Encyclopedia Brittanica account:

“[The] Tuskegee syphilis study, official name Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, American medical research project… earned notoriety for its unethical experimentation on African American patients in the rural South.

“The project, which was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) from 1932 to 1972, examined the natural course of untreated syphilis in African American men…. In order to recruit participants for its study, the PHS enlisted the support of the prestigious Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University)… A group of 399 infected patients and 201 uninfected control patients were recruited for the program. The subjects were all impoverished sharecroppers from Macon County [Alabama].

“The subjects were not told that they had syphilis or that the disease could be transmitted through sexual intercourse. Instead, they were told that they suffered from ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to refer to a range of ills. Treatment was initially part of the study, and some patients were administered arsenic, bismuth, and mercury. But after the original [six-month] study failed to produce any useful data, it was decided to follow the subjects until their deaths, and all treatment was halted. Penicillin was denied to the infected men after that drug became available in the mid-1940s, and it was still being withheld from them 25 years later, in direct violation of government legislation that mandated the treatment of venereal disease. It is estimated that more than 100 of the subjects died of tertiary syphilis.”

Conclusion

We have seen that majorities of scientific specialists, funded by government, have on occasion promoted absurdities that led to atrocities — while persecuting the minority of scientists who dissented. This brings us to the present and a fifth absurdity that will surely lead to atrocities — the false climate-crisis claims of Democrats and the Biden administration. The present administration promotes the absurd theory that there is a climate crisis caused by CO2 from the fossil fuels that have powered two centuries of human progress, that are now furthering global agricultural productivity, and whose concentration levels are now near a 500 million year low.