Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Cybercast News Service (CNS) obtained a copy of the memo, which was directed to all executive branch heads of departments and agencies in developing budget priorities. The communication also demands that “understanding, adapting to and mitigating the impacts of global climate change” be a budget priority, as well as insisting that agencies should
prioritize research for measuring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions. Support, within coordinated interagency investments in the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an integrated and continuing National Climate Assessment of climate change science, impacts, vulnerabilities, and response strategies, including mitigation and adaptation.…
Agencies should pursue transformational solutions to the Nation’s practical challenges, and budget submission should therefore explain how agencies will support long-term, visionary thinkers proposing high-risk, high-return (or "potentially transformative") research.
This mandate came despite the fact that significant numbers of scientists disagree with the premise that the planet is warming, and those who do agree with that theory often note that during the Medieval Warm Period, places like Scotland, Iceland, and Newfoundland (“Vinland” or “Vineland” to the Vikings), grew grapes that no longer grow naturally in that region because it is too cold. And many of those scientists who agree that the planet may be going through warming note that many natural causes, like sunspots, and not human activity may be the cause.
The memo includes more than just a presumption that the planet is warming and that this is caused by human-generated “greenhouse gas emissions.” What the Obama administration has done is politically conclude that those who disagree with the theory that the planet is warming and those who disagree with the theory that human activity has caused any planetary warming are scientifically wrong. The idea that government should determine scientific conclusions ought to send a chill down the spine of any free-thinking person.
History has many examples of state-sponsored savants connecting weather with human actions and calling for "needed" sacrifice — human sacrifice — in order to keep the cycles of season and weather in balance. Science in ancient empires, such as the Aztec, Maya, and Assyrian, explained how nature behaved and how regimented sacrifice — literally human slaughter — affected that. If the “Flowery Way” of the Aztecs or the molten arms of Baal in the Phoenician civilization seems too distant and too different to relate to us today, then we need only look at the last century of modern totalitarianism.
Trofim Lysenko was a scientist in Stalinist Russia. His theory of botany, which asserted that acquired characteristics — characteristics acquired through exercise or studying hard or environmental causes — could be passed on to offspring, was not new, but it was also not true. Father Mendel had shown in the prior century with his experiments with peas that dominant and recessive genes were the means through which the biological heritage of life was conveyed.
Lysenko, however, got the ear of Stalin, and the Great Leader of Marxism determined that this version of botany was superior to what had been taught in Russia, and around the world, for many decades. The torture chambers of the OGPU and the ghastly camps of the MKVD filled with biologists, zoologists, botanists, and any other life scientist who did not accept this ideologically superior version of science.
About the same time, the “Jewish science” that the rest of the world accepted was rejected by Nazis in favor of Aryan science. Never mind that no one really knew what “Aryan Science” was supposed to be and never mind that the racial theories upon which Nazism was based assumed that one of the most non-homogenous groups of people in the world, the Germans, were somehow a “race” with unique identity.
When government dictates science, then the results conform to what government wants. This certainly seems to be true with the theory of manmade global warming. None of us who cherish America’s traditional support for private and divergent thinking would want the government suppressing scientific theories that we, or even most Americans, thought was wrong. Our history is filled with individuals proving the rest of the country and the rest of the world wrong.
Science is safest when it is far from government. Indeed, the vast majority of human activity is safest when it is farthest from government. The elevation of men like Al Gore into the status of scientific guru does not just endanger our liberties by creating state-approved science, but it also cripples true science, which almost by the nature of discovery must override the theories and opinions of other scientists, and must reside in the mind of a single man first. Science by political consensus is actually anti-science: Just ask the ghosts of botanists who died in the Gulag because of Lysenko.
