In the long run the phony anthropogenic climate change confidence racket may rescue true science from the corruption inflicted upon it by power-mad politicians and greedy special interest groups.
James Lewis reaches back to the Stalin era and plucks from its muck a "scientist" whose elevation of politics over hard science contributed to the starvation of millions. His ding-bat theory of crop education and training was believed by no one but since it well suited the political agenda of the Soviet dictator it became "science" by fiat. Today the heirs of this "scientist" run public health in nearly every country on earth.
In politicized science, public hysteria actually builds careers; in real science, it tends to ruin careers. Science becomes unhealthy when its only real question — "what is true?" — is sabotaged by vested interests, by ideological Commissars, or even by grant-swinging scientists.
We are surrounded by hysteria. Panic over epidemics of smoking and overeating are fanned. Climate change threatens to end life as we know it! Without the panic drummed up by political mediocrities and fueled by the rabble-rousing press the "problems" of tobacco, nutrition and global warming, based on actual science, wouldn’t rate a paragraph, let alone the raft of legislation cranked out in states and in Washington, DC.
Vested interests, whether financial, as in the case of the pharmaceutical industry paying for anti-tobacco studies to promote the sale of its smoking cessation products, ideological, as motive for power-hungry politicians to control and direct behavior, or both as seen in the armies of "health" professionals whose wasteful and fraudulent "research" and policy blueprints supply big incomes and the opportunity to boss people around, trump real science every time.
Unfortunately James Lewis’ litany of pathological science omits that which was marshaled up to eliminate smoking. Anti-tobacco scientific corruption set the scene for all the pathological science that floods the globe now. It was the canary in the coal mine and that bird’s death was ignored and hidden. It’s up to us now, as the baseless hysteria increases, to drive a stake into the heart of politicized science before it is too late. Too much has already been lost, we don’t want to lose it all.
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