Climate Change Dispatch - Climate Change: The Keywords (Part 2 of 3)

...It is indeed regrettable that this sober advice has been deliberately overlooked by a good deal of the scientific community involved in the climate research and related themes (beginning with the Academy itself). Perhaps, in many cases this attitude has been motivated by the lure of the incentives offered by the AGW machine – plentiful research grants, mediatic exposition, prestige, the professional pride of making part of a branch of science elevated to stardom, business consulting opportunities and many others.

On the other hand, besides the hundreds of billion dollars that have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a theory that is not supported by the physical world evidences, the “warmist” thrust is harming science in quite dangerous ways. First, it is pushing science aside from the perspective of providing a reasoned and relatively well informed assessment of the climate dynamics that may provide an useful guidance for long-term strategies and public policies – absolutely necessary due to the climate’s enormous importance in the human affairs. Second, it is distorting the public perception of science in such a way that the non-partisan climate scientists will likely have a hard time trying to regain the public trust after the seemingly unavoidable wear and tear of the alarmist outlook.

History offers a gloomy precedent of such poisoning of science by ideology and special interests: the infamous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union, the ruthless opposition to genetics headed by Trofim D. Lysenko and his cohorts between the 1930s and 1960s. In addition to the physical elimination of stubborn scientists who resisted the “consensual official line” (the “skeptics” of the time), the price of such an irrationality pandemics was enormous, costing the Soviet biological and agricultural sciences a half a century hold-up whose consequences are felt still today.