THE “SCIENCE” MANTRA Thomas Sowell Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as "scientific socialism." By the 20th century, all sorts of notions wrapped themselves in the mantle of "science." "Global warming" hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is "science." The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth-- the hallmark of real science-- has taken a back seat to a political crusade. An intercepted e-mail from a professor at the Climate Research Unit in England to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania warned the latter: "Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act" and urged the American professor to delete any e-mails he may have sent a colleague regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them. As for politicians, Senator Barbara Boxer has urged prosecution of the hackers who uncovered and revealed the e-mails! People who have in the past applauded whistleblowers in business, in the military, or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data-- and deliberate cover-ups of all this-- in the global warming establishment. Factual data are crucial in real science. Einstein himself urged that his own theory of relativity not be accepted until it could be empirically verified. This verification came when scientists around the world observed an eclipse of the sun and discovered that light behaved as Einstein's theory said it would behave, however implausible that might have seemed beforehand. Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people-- in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria-- let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the "wrong hands." People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth. Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few-- like themselves-- can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives. No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it. This is tragically the case as regards many other issues, besides global warming, where data are made available only to the true believers and kept out of the hands of those who think otherwise. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust. REPRINTED FROM TOWNHALL.COMhttp://townhall.com/http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell.html?columnsName=tsoshapeimage_1_link_0
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 THE GREAT ESCAPE Thomas Sowell Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation-- that is, something outside the control of the individuals directly involved. Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education. But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this "non-judgmental" age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless. After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per student-- and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live, much less the larger world and its history-- most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs or even peddle drugs. The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior. Differences in infant mortality rates provoke pious editorials on a need for more prenatal care to be provided by the government for those unable to afford it. In other words, the explanation is automatically assumed to be external to the mothers involved and the solution is assumed to be something that "we" can do for "them." While it is true that black mothers get less prenatal care than white mothers and have higher infant mortality rates, it is also true that women of Mexican ancestry also get less prenatal care than white women and yet have lower infant mortality rates than white women. But, once people with the prevailing social vision see the first set of facts, they seldom look for any other facts that might go against the explanation that fits their vision of the world. No small part of the current confusion between "health care" and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives. There can be grave practical consequences of a dogmatic insistence on external explanations that allow individuals to escape personal responsibility. Americans can end up ruining the best medical care in the world in the vain hope that a government takeover will give us better health. Economic issues are approached in the same way. People with low incomes are seen as a problem for other people to solve. Studies which follow the same individuals over time show that the vast majority of working people who are in the bottom 20 percent of income earners at a given time end up rising out of that bracket. Many are simply beginners who get beginners' wages but whose pay rises as they acquire more skills and experience. Yet there is a small minority of workers who do not rise and a large number of people who seldom work and who-- surprise!-- have low incomes as a result. Seldom is there any thought that people who choose to waste years of their own time (and the taxpayers' money) in school need to change their own behavior-- or to visibly suffer the consequences, so that their fate can be a warning to others coming after them, not to make that same mistake. It is not just the "non-judgmental" ideology of the intelligentsia but also the self-interest of politicians that leads to so much downplaying of personal responsibility in favor of external explanations and external programs to "solve" the "problem." On these and other issues, government programs are far less likely to solve the country's problems than to solve the politicians' problem of getting the votes of those whose think the answer to every problem is for the government to "do something." COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
WE’VE BEEN HAD Walter E Williams Last year, my column "Global Warming Rope-A-Dope" (12/24/08) started out: "Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy the planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil." New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies, engaged in scientific and academic fraud but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. CRU has the world's largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world, including the U.S., its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 global warming report. The e-mails involved communication among climate researchers and policy advocates around the world who brazenly discuss both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims. They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. There's also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical "tricks" to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years. One e-mail said, "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." Another said, "it would be nice to try to 'contain' the putative 'MWP,' even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back." MWP refers to the Medieval Warm Period (800 A.D. to 1300 A.D.) when the Earth was much warmer than it is now. This bothers the global warmers because they can't blame the temperature increase a thousand years ago on SUVs, coal-burning power plants, incandescent bulbs and 60-inch TV screens. Editors of professional journals, who were willing to publish articles that disagreed with the warmers, were forced to resign -- as was in the cases of editors at Climate Research and Geophysical Research Letters. A flagrant example of suppression is found in CRU director Phil Jones', letter to Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann that questions whether the work of academics who question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the IPCC report, which represents the environmental extremist's view on climate science. Jones writes, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" The fact of the matter is an increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling. Geologist Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Emeritus Professor at Western Washington University, says, "Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely." Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, currently at Uppsala University in Sweden asks, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" Last year's column closed with my speculation that if ever "the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it's not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more." This is confirmed by the Obama administration's climate czar, Carol Browner, who, despite dishonesty, fraud and criminality, says she considers the science on global warming settled. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM http://townhall.com/http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel.htmlshapeimage_14_link_0
WHAT MAKES AMERICA GREAT John Stossel For all its problems, America is a great place. And one thing that makes America great is its prosperity. Yes, some people have suffered during the recession -- but compared to all the other countries in the history of the world, America is rich. Why? One reason is that America is a good place to do business. Dinesh D'Souza, author of "What's So Great about America," points out: "In most other societies, the businessman has been looked down upon. He's been seen as a kind of sleazy guy. But then American founders specifically put protection for patents and trademarks in the Constitution. And suddenly, the entrepreneur is taken from the bottom of the heap and brought to the front." Today, Asian students crush Americans on standardized tests, but it's Americans who invent things like the transistor and the integrated circuit and go on to win disproportionate numbers of Nobel Prizes. Our culture of entrepreneurship turns that science into wealth. TV pitchman Anthony Sullivan is from Britain, but he says his business didn't thrive there. "I found in England if there's 10 reasons you could do something, there's 20 reasons why you couldn't do it, you shouldn't do it, " says Sullivan. "I found in the States that people will give you a shot." One sign of this attitude is that it's relatively easy to start a business here. I opened one in Wilmington, Del. I named it the Stossel Store. It was just a table from which I pitched my "Give Me a Break" book and Fox merchandise. I picked Wilmington because our research showed that Delaware and Nevada make opening a business easier than other states. It still took me a week to get legal permission, but it would have taken much longer in Europe. "I have started businesses in the U.K. and India. It takes at least a month or more just to open doors," A.J. Khubani, president of TeleBrands, says. Unfortunately, bureaucrats are threatening this good part of America. I had to register with the Delaware Secretary of State and the Division of Corporations, get a federal employer identification number, buy commercial liability insurance, register with the Delaware state Department of Finance, etc. I didn't even try to open a business in my hometown, New York City, because the bureaucracy is so ferocious. The fastest-growing cities of the world make it easier. In Hong Kong several years ago, I got a business permit in just one day. It's a reason Hong Kong is rich. Entrepreneurs are encouraged. But at least America is a close second. America also has a different idea about failure. The Stossel Store was a bad idea. I lost money. D'Souza says that in other places, that would be evidence that I am a complete failure. I tried to make a profit, failed and so shouldn't try again. That's the attitude in most of the world, says D'Souza. "You say: 'You know what? I tried my hand at business. It didn't work. Now, let me take a salary job where I'll have some security." He says that's not true in America. "An American will start a company. It'll fail. Pretty soon, he's starting a newspaper, or he's now trying to export fish to Japan." We know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but Edison failed much more often than he succeeded. He had hundreds of failures. He was fired by the telegraph office, and lost money on a cement company and an iron business. Henry Ford's first company failed completely. Dr. Seuss' first book was rejected by 27 publishers. Oprah was fired from her first job as a reporter. A TV station called her unfit for television. "There's something in the American temperament that says, 'Gosh, I lost seven times but that's OK,'" D'Souza says. "And I think that that's a resiliency of the American spirit." It's one of several great things about America. DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COMhttp://www.wnd.com/?pageId=43&authorId=238&tId=8http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=43&authorId=238&tId=8shapeimage_15_link_0shapeimage_15_link_1