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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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Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Living Law

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

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

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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