Science kept out by the greens' dogma

To environmentalists data is an evil that demystifies the romance of nature, writes Ian Plimer. Ian Plimer is professor of geology at the University of Melbourne

I write from the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort in the far north Flinders Ranges of South Australia where I do geological field work in this mountainous and unforgiving wilderness in summer. This is a privilege. Field work is an attempt to understand nature and this intimacy with nature stimulates questioning. Science is based on dominant paradigms that are open to change at any time. Our understanding of nature requires a depth and breadth of knowledge, a healthy uncertainty, a willingness to change and a measure of awe provoked by the complexity of nature.

Nature changes rapidly and continues to surprise. Climate, sea level, the atmosphere, life, landscapes and temperature all change rapidly by many mechanisms for a diversity of reasons. For millions of years hominids and other organisms have survived, adapted and become extinct as a result of these changes. Nature is not mysterious; it is quantifiable. Science is married to evidence and divorced from value judgement.

We scientists argue about the data, which may be from measurement, calculation, observation or experiment. The explanation of data - a theory - is the neatest way of explaining such data and this, too, provokes healthy argument. New data or a re-evaluation of old data commonly results in the abandonment of a treasured popular paradigm. This is the methodology of science.

Herein lies the problem with city-based greens and religious fundamentalists such as creationists. The idol for worship is a dogmatic ideology enshrined in value judgements that allows no change despite scientific data to the contrary.

Nature is made the mystery by greens in isolation from integrated interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, somewhat contrary to traditional Christian views where the mystery is the supernatural. It is for this reason that I argue that environmental groups are a modern urban religion, albeit terribly flawed. From Paul Tillich's theological perspective, the change from the dominant paradigm to dogma is a shift from preliminary to ultimate concerns resulting in evil.

Creationists have not evolved from the science and inexact literalist contradictory theology of the mid-17th century when the popular scientific paradigm was that the planet was 6000 years old and a mythical great flood shaped the planet's surface, deposited fossiliferous sediments and killed sinners.

The greens can not accept that the good old days were not good old days, that natural changes are far greater than even their worst case human-induced doomsday scenario and that we now live in a society blessed with saviours such as science, technology and industry. Our greens bathe in the benefits of an industrial society yet, for reasons of nefarious politics, hypocrisy and ignorance, decide to be both within and without our industrial society.

Many city folk have lost contact with nature and this can be deeply disturbing. Such disconnection produces a romantic yearning for that which never existed, a yearning to be at one with nature despite a lack of understanding of nature and a yearning to do something, whatever something might be. This disconnection produces irrationality, contradictions and the creation of green fundamentalism as the new religion of urban environmentalists. Disconnection of city people from nature has only added to the frustration of depoliticised rural people, thereby creating political instability. In the cities, this disconnection is exacerbated by the lack of connection between seasons and seasonal foods or killing and meat protein and an uncompromising dogma about those outside cities who take risks to produce the energy, water, food and mineral resources we so voraciously consume.

We watch asinine survival programs unaware that there are 20 film support crew out of shot. Such programs appeal to our primitive instincts yet show how disconnected from nature we really have become. We plant gardens comprising water-hungry northern European vegetation, consume more and more water, don't build new dams and don't collect roof rainwater. We buy a four-wheel-drive to use on highways in the wilderness or watch concocted nature programs on television. We feel good to see large green areas on maps called national parks and then promptly forget about these areas. The ancient monastics were correct. An extended time in a desert wilderness allows the discarding of trivialities, an interaction and connection with nature and an understanding of our place in the world. And it is not really a very important place after all.

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Put a Stop to 'Big Tofu'

You've surely heard about the political bogeymen "Big Oil" and "Big Tobacco," but when it comes to your freedom to choose the foods you eat, there's no special interest more powerful than "Big Tofu." From attacks on movie theater popcorn to fast food burgers, Big Tofu wants to keep you from dining on steak, French fries, soda and anything else it deems bad for you. The top priority: protect you from yourself by imposing its vegan-leaning, beans-and-rice, "if-it-tastes-good-it-must-be-bad-for-you" views on what constitutes a proper diet.

As laughable as that may sound, the food nannies wield considerable influence in Congress, the media, and state governments. Nowhere has this influence been as strong as in the state of California, where yesterday's anti-establishment radicals are today's elected officials. And, by using its pull in the nation's most populous state, Big Tofu is increasingly in the position to dictate food policy to the other 49.

Take, as an example, the California law known as Proposition 65. Under Prop 65, a product that has any amount of any substance suspected of causing some health effect in some animals has to carry health warning labels. That may sound like a good thing, but the law is most often used by activists to hammer politically unpopular food producers with irrelevant and out-of-context "warnings."

For example, world renowned University of California at Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames has documented how naturally occurring substances in plants—such as caffeic acid in coffee and limonene in orange juice—are among the most potent carcinogens in the human diet.

As long as the left coast set keeps sipping their cafe lattes, though, you'll never hear about that. Nor should you worry, since there's not nearly enough of either of those substances in your diet to make them dangerous. But under Prop 65, the amount doesn't matter. The law is all about scaring consumers away from foods Big Tofu just don't like.

What makes Prop 65 especially pernicious is its so-called "bounty hunter" provision, which allows anyone to file a lawsuit to enforce the warnings. The latest is a nuisance suit against five popular restaurant chains in California, filed by a group that promotes vegetarian diets. The lawsuits allege that char-grilled beef and chicken supposedly represent a cancer threat because of trace amounts of a substance called pyridine, formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures no different than your backyard barbeque.

And California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is suing several fast food restaurants and potato chip makers over a substance called acrylamide, which is formed naturally any time starchy foods are baked or fried.

It doesn't seem to matter to Lockyer that the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have concluded that these naturally occurring levels of acrylamide pose no health threat to consumers. It doesn't matter, because Prop 65 isn't about protecting anyone's health. Its purpose is to promote two of Big Tofu's most important goals.

First, however spurious they may be, labels that warn about carcinogens or toxins in food will surely scare consumers away. That's why snack makers and fast food restaurants have been targeted: Big Tofu doesn't think consumers can or should be trusted to choose those foods for themselves.

Second, once foods are forced to wear a Prop 65 warning in California, they become targets for ambulance-chasing lawyers around the country. "Of course, the company is guilty," they'll tell juries. "It says right on the label that the product contains a carcinogen." The only alternatives for food companies are to re-label their products for the rest of the country or pay the huge fines that could drive them out of California or out of business. Fortunately, Congress is taking a small step toward stopping this insanity by passing the National Uniformity for Food Act. The proposed law would empower the Food and Drug Administration to set national, science-based food labeling standards. And that will help bring an end to the scaremongering of politically-motivated state rules.

Big Tofu's media rampages against Chinese food, fettuccine Alfredo, popcorn, burgers, and soft drinks are hardly news. But too few people know how Big Tofu's legal strong-arming and backroom blackmail ultimately result in higher food prices and fewer choices for consumers. It's time to tell Big Tofu that it doesn't know beans about food science, food safety, or the needs of American consumers. And the National Uniformity for Food Act is a good first step to restoring some common sense to our food labeling system.

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THE GREENIES ARE HOSTILE TO CIVILIZATION

As primitive man moved out from his sub-tropical paradise, it was his ingenuity that enabled him to cope with the rigours of the more hostile climate. Furs, houses and energy, in the form of fire, opened up new regions to conquest. The horse was exploited to supplement man's own inadequate musculature, so transport and agriculture combined to provide the basis of viable settlements and trade. Mankind became largely concentrated in villages, towns and, ultimately, cities. These were not inherently viable, but the process of invention, which eventually led to the industrial revolution, provided a framework within which they could thrive. Industry, ugly, careless and unaesthetic though it might be, was the hub around which the new civilisation developed. Science and its methods, begun as the mental exercise of a few dilettantes, grew into the driving force. Those who had been enslaved by the requirement for menial tasks of a manual and, later, mental nature, were gradually liberated from them and leisure ceased to become a monopoly of the privileged few. Science freed humanity from many of the random hazards of life, such as infectious disease.

Unfortunately, science also provided support for the base aggressive instincts of mankind, in the form of weapons of hideous capability. This led to a hostility to science that is now all-pervading.

We arrived at the paradoxical situation in which the ingredients that liberated man from a life of toil also gave him the leisure to develop new systems of belief that were hostile to those very props. Knock them away and there would be a rapid return to the short and brutish fight for survival that was the everyday experience of stone-age man. Yet many of the very people who benefited most from the freedom to think, which came from the exploitation of extra-human sources of energy, became those who sought to undermine them.

Thus the keystone of western civilisation is energy. Those who would destroy it, from within or without, simply have to cut off supply of this vital commodity to ensure its collapse into primitive chaos.

It is one of the characteristics of the human child that he throws his toys out of the pram without thought as to how he will cope without them. Much of the activity is, of course, purely ritual. The dedicated townie, who would not last more than a few days in the real world of nature, rides his bike to the supermarket and buys so-called organic food, which he takes back to a home adorned with a token and quite useless windmill. He votes for a youthful and plausible politician who has never run anything, but promises to do away with the trappings of a civilisation that has kept him alive against all the odds.

It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that the most accessible forms of fossil fuel are concentrated outside the western democracies, who have sleep-walked into a situation in which they are now subject to blackmail and coercion. The gurus of primitivism fly round the world (how come they can afford to when most of us cannot?) promoting myths such as first global cooling and then global warming, to which, according to their strictures, they are contributing more than their fair share; myths that do not stand up to the most cursory scientific examination.

The Green fifth column actively oppose the development of any realistic sources of energy, from fossil to nuclear, while promoting those that are intermittent, impracticable, expensive and inadequate.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

(From John Brignell, 9 June 2006)

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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