Malpractice in science

I was writing at my laptop on Saturday, June 16, while watching television and the disbarment proceedings of the lawyer and prosecutor Mike Nifong of Raleigh, North Carolina. The proceedings were led by the chairman of the disciplinary committee, F. Lane Williamson, who stripped the prosecutor of his lawyer's license and disbarred him. According to Williamson, Nifong had broken North Carolina's rules of professional conduct more than two dozen times. Stunningly he had also withheld exculpatory DNA evidence showing that all 3 of the defendants were innocent.

The legal process of exoneration of the 3 young men had taken more than a year, destroyed their lives, and sullied the entire lacrosse team, the reputation of Duke University and its hate-filled faculty. It directly impacted the families, friends, and the community not to mention the several million dollars spent in the defense of innocent young men. At least we can acknowledge that in the legal systems in our nation we do have an appeals process for legal malpractice, however slow, ponderous, and costly it is.

Unfortunately, we do not have such a corrective system to appeal scientific malpractice, no fixed rules for scientific misconduct and few penalties of any significance. A few get noticed, a few are embarrassed, but serious sanctions are rare and are quite sporadic (http://tinyurl.com/plsbn). Examples abound in environmental science, regulation, and litigation. Adding to this are too many editors of science journals who have assumed advocacy roles for promoting specific agendas, as well as the failure of the peer review processes.

DDT is one of the most effective tools ever in the fight against malaria (http://tinyurl.com/2xzquc). Yet it was banned in 1972 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is still banned and the malarial death rates continue by the thousands. And talk about the repression of evidence. During the DDT hearings of 1972, some scientists stated that DDT was a human carcinogen. This was shown to be untrue. Some scientists said that DDT caused eggshell thinning in birds. This was also shown to be untrue. Some scientists said that DDT caused declines in bird populations. This was untrue. A number of bird populations increased many times during the periods of DDT use. Even with substantial contrary evidence available at the time, the EPA proceeded to ban DDT. And talk about scientific malpractice ruining lives. The EPA ban with full support of the environmental movement has led to the malaria deaths of more than 30,000,000 people since then. Additionally, hundreds of millions suffer from the non-fatal effects of the disease. Yet we have no appeals process for such scientific malpractice, not even follow-up activities to determine impacts of the decision to ban DDT.

There are many other environmental issues as well which have involved heavy use of scientific malpractice, with no threat of scientific review or penalties. Without any viable process for appealing the malpractice of science, the nation and the world continue to suffer egregiously both in horrendous wasted costs and millions of lives lost. The global warming issue is just the latest in a long series of pseudo-alarms involving scientific malpractice.

And talk about the misrepresentation of data. The `hockeystick" issue is but one. The irresponsible research paper which developed the hockeystick chart was presented by the authors as representing the last 1000 years of global temperature data. In actuality it did not do this. Problems were found immediately. The chart did not show, for example, the well-known Middle Age Warming which peaked around 1100 AD at a warmer time when Vikings were farming in and raising sheep in Greenland. It did not show the Little Ice Age which lasted for centuries and extended into the 1800s. Yet this chart was approved by the IPCC editors and reviewers, was embraced by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and incorporated into its 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR). Based in part on these findings the IPCC had urged the nations of the world to embrace these findings and use them to formulate crippling multi-national energy and emission policies.

Only with great diligence and phenomenal computer and statistical skills by two men, was the fraud discovered. Without them this may never have been discovered, certainly not by the IPCC and supporters. See for example, (http://tinyurl.com/2echm7). All of those parties above, the authors, the IPCC editors, the peer reviewers, and the IPCC itself are culpable in promoting the fraud of the hockeystick. The warmer times of the Medieval Warming Period and the cooler times of the Little Ice Age and the million years of earlier global climates all tell a different story of climate change and its likely causes. And these didn't involve mankind, CO2, or the so-called crimes of capitalism. Talk about withholding exculpatory evidence.

And talk about harmful agendas and the ethically challenged among the warmers. In December, 2006 Dr. David Deming, a geophysicist at the University of Oklahoma, gave testimony to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (http://tinyurl.com/yf9q8t). In 1995 he had published an article in Science on borehole data which indicated a slight warming in North America over the past 100 to 150 years. And talk about media bias. The week his Science article appeared he was contacted by a reporter at National Public Radio (NPR). He offered to interview Dr. Deming only on the condition that Deming state that the warming was due to human activity. Deming refused and the reporter hung up. Talk about the suppression of information. In that same testimony Deming said he got an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. The researcher said "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period". The MWP was inconsistent with the warming agenda. "An Inconvenient Truth", one might say.

Such unscientific and irresponsible behavior can go unchecked and uncorrected indefinitely because there is no formal corrective structure in place in science, as there are in the legal community. There is no price to be paid by abusers. Orchestrating pre-determined scientific outcomes is dishonest, unethical, costly, and dangerous. We saw this in the DDT fiasco. In fact it is not science. It is naked dishonesty. In promoting the case of "man-made global warming" which specifically targets and limits the US capacity to produce energy from fossil fuels (providing transportation and 55% of our electricity), it is also treasonous.

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Hold the line on global warming

What should conservatives do about global warming? Jim Manzi suggests in his June 25 National Review cover story ("Game Plan") that conservatives embrace junk science and "manage" global climate change so that they can "peel off" 1 percent of the votes from the "opposing coalition" in some future presidential election.

Manzi's is a recipe for social, political and economic disaster - not just for conservatives, but for everyone, with the possible exception of the misanthropic, back-to-nature socialists among us. "It is no longer possible, scientifically or politically, to deny that human activities have very likely increased global temperatures.," intones Manzi, who has apparently spent too much time watching "An Inconvenient Truth." It's clear from his article that he neither understands the science nor the politics of global warming.

Manzi says we should believe in global warming because of the "underlying physics." He writes, "All else equal, the more CO2 molecules we have in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets." But both the underlying physics and historical climate data debunk this statement. Different greenhouse gases absorb different wavelengths of energy emitted by the Earth. The fact that only a limited amount of the Earth's emitted energy is available for absorption by CO2 and that CO2 has to compete with water vapor and clouds for that energy, results in a crucial (but little publicized) logarithimic relationship between CO2 and temperature - that is, as atmospheric CO2 increases, it absorbs less and less additional energy to produce correspondingly less and less additional warming. At some point, adding more atmospheric CO2 doesn't significantly change atmospheric temperature.

To analogize, consider a window with many shades, each blocking half the incoming light. As successive shades are pulled, the transmitted light is halved and the effect of each shade is diminished. Eventually, there's no additional effect because previous shades have already absorbed the light to all but a vanishing degree. As more shades won't block more light, more CO2 won't cause significantly more warming.

In fact, there's been more than enough greenhouse gas in the atmosphere to cause much greater warming than actually occurs since long before humans discovered fire. From a historical perspective, consider the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature for the period 1940-1970. As atmospheric CO2 levels steadily increased during this period, global temperatures decreased, giving rise to the 1970s-era scare of an impending ice age. It's also clear that, if there has been a relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature since the 1970s, it's not readily apparent.

And let's not forget the third-rail of global warming debate - one that Al Gore carefully slid over in his movie - the actual relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperature. While alarmists would have us assume that increases in atmospheric CO2 precede and cause increases in global temperature, the scientific data say the exact opposite. Historical data taken from polar ice core samples indicate that increases in temperature have preceded increases in atmospheric CO2 by several hundred years. Not letting this "inconvenient truth" spoil his movie, Al Gore only describes the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature as "complex."

Indeed, it is. So why let it get in the way of the most subtle yet audacious political power grab of our time. Manzi has taken Gore's bait and is running with it. We'll get to the politics in a moment, but there are a few other points to make about Manzi's presentation of the science. Manzi writes that, "The most important scientific debate is really about.feedback effects," by which he refers to the notion that changes in atmospheric CO2 cause a complicated set of feedback effects that supposedly magnify and reduce the greenhouse effect. Manzi specifically mentions that higher atmospheric temperatures melt the polar ice caps, which in turn, supposedly causes more warming, and that more atmospheric CO2 increases plant growth which removes CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby cooling the climate.

The reality, however, is that these feedback loops are hypothetical in nature and no one really understands them, if they exist. No one knows why the Arctic ice caps seem to be receding. Glacial melting is a complex geologic event that seems to have little to do with atmospheric temperatures.

During the warming period from 1880 to 1938, it's estimated that the atmospheric CO2 increased by an estimated 20 parts per million. But from 1938 to 2003 - a period of essentially no increase in Arctic warming - the atmospheric CO2 increased another 60 parts per million. It doesn't seem plausible, then, that Arctic temperatures are significantly influenced by atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.

Global warming worriers can take no comfort from Antarctic data either. Over the last 30 years, atmospheric CO2 increased by about 15 percent, from about 328 parts per million to about 372 parts per million. But the Antarctic temperature trend for that period indicates a slight cooling. This observation contrasts sharply with the relatively steep Antarctic warming observed from 1949 to 1974, which was accompanied by a much more modest increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

As to trees removing CO2 from the atmosphere, well, some do and some don't. Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (April 17) that while tropical forests exert a cooling influence on global climate, forests in northern regions, because of their absorption of sunlight, exert a warming influence - and it's not just a trivial climatic effect. Based on the researchers' computer modeling, forests above 20 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere - that is, north of the line of latitude running through Southern Mexico, Saharan Africa, central India and the southernmost Chinese island of Hainan - will warm surface temperatures in those regions by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. It would seem that climate jihadists might well start their anti-warming campaigns in the chainsaw isle of their local hardware stores, rather than coming for our SUVs, incandescent light bulbs and thermostats.

Manzi's reading of the political situation is as wrong-headed as his facts and reasoning on the science. He suggests that conservatives turn global warming alarmism into a political advantage by essentially out-marketing the enviros on the solutions. "Conservatives should propose policies that are appropriately optimistic, science-based and low-cost. A key political question is there fore which side could more effectively use its position on carbon taxes to peel off 1 percent of the relevant votes from the opposing coalition," he writes.

Why won't putting a happy-face on being the low-cost-provider of planetary apocalypticism work? Because averting planetary disaster is not what global warming alarmism is all about. There are many nefarious agendas driving the global warming controversy, none of them have anything to do with "saving" the planet, and to pretend they don't exist is to truly live in denial.

First, there are the radical left-wing environmentalists whose goal - through control of energy production and use, and ultimately the economy - is global socialism. As Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore related in the recent Channel 4 (UK) documentary, entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle," by the mid-1980s, environmental goals - e.g., clean air and clean water - had become so mainstream that activists had to adopt more extreme positions to remain anti-establishment. Then when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, many "peace-niks" and left-wing political activists moved over to environmental activism, bringing their "neo-Marxist" political philosophy with them. As Moore puts it, environmentalism became the "new guise for anti-capitalism."

Then there are the Europeans who are responsible for launching global warming alarmism in the first place. When Margaret Thatcher became UK Prime Minister in 1979, her mandate was to reduce Britain's economic decline. Thatcher wanted to make the UK energy-independent through nuclear power - she didn't like her country's reliance on coal, which politically empowered the coal miner unions, or oil, which empowered Middle Eastern states. So Thatcher latched onto her science adviser's notion that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide warmed the planet in a harmful way, thereby providing the perfect political cover for advancing her nuclear power agenda without having to fight the miners or Arab oil states. She empowered the U.K. Meteorological Office to begin global climate change research, a move that eventually led to the 1988 creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' group that has come to be the "official" international agency for global warming alarmism.

The Europeans now see global warming as a means of hampering U.S. economic competitiveness through increased energy prices. In a global warming-worried world, it becomes more expensive to use coal, for example. About 52 percent of U.S. electricity is produced by burning coal. France, in contrast, gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Guess whose economy takes the hit. The Europeans also know that environmentalists and trial lawyers will ensure that greenhouse gas emissions regulations are strictly enforced in the U.S. The same cannot be said for Europe.

There is also the gigantic global warming bureaucracy that's been created over the last 20 years. Whereas there used to be only a handful of scientists who called themselves atmospheric scientists, now there are legions of self-proclaimed "climatologists" along with the attendant bureaucracies to support them. U.S. taxpayers alone support this gang to a tune of about $5 billion per year. Where a zoologist might previously have had difficulty getting a grant to study the mating habits of squirrels, a whole new world of possibilities opens up if the newly minted climato-zoologist asks for funding to study whether changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are making female squirrels friskier.

Perhaps the most effective of these pro-global warming groups is big business. The alternative energy industry uses global warming fearmongering to sell subsidized, but still high-priced energy. Wal-Mart wants us to pay $5.99 for inferior but climate-friendly light bulbs, rather than $0.75 for traditional incandescent bulbs. Dupont and other manufacturing giants want Congress to dole out global warming pork for their past, voluntary reductions in greenhouse gases. Goldman Sachs owns part of the climate exchanges on which permits to emit greenhouse gases are to be traded. Global warming hysteria was just that, until big business climbed aboard the climate railroad. Now with its army of lobbyists in Washington, many businesses see global warming as a lucrative endeavor and they are trying to engineer congressional action for their own limited interests.

And let's not forget Congress and other state and local politicians who, not surprisingly, have adopted the Green veneer of virtue. "Green-ness" has become the new moral high ground that few dare to challenge. Those that do are pilloried as "skeptics" and likened to Holocaust deniers. It's no surprise that so many politicians - not a courageous lot to start with - have opted to join the Big Green machine.

All this apparently is lost on Manzi whose penultimate thought is, "But by getting past denial and taking a science-based approach to the issue, a clever candidate could take a principled stand that pays major tactical dividends." But cleverness will not likely protect our freedoms and wallets from the Greens, Europeans, global bureaucracy, rent-seeking businesses and Congress. These groups need to be sternly faced-down with the scientific and economic realities of global warming. Right now, conservatives are leading the charge in favor of sound science, and against climate clamoring and profiteering. That should continue to be our "game plan." That is the principled stand.

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Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren: Most Economists Predict a Bright Future

Will our children and grandchildren live in a better world, or will economic and social conditions decline? Every culture has worried over this question-often for good reason. One would think that modern man, living amid ever-rising material comforts and a security unimagined by his ancestors, would have moved beyond this fear. But despite our growing prosperity there is a renewed fear in many quarters that we are living on borrowed time, because we're running out of resources and endangering our very environment.

Once, economists would have been counted among the pessimists. The moniker "the dismal science" surely stuck for such a long time because so many economists followed the lead of Thomas Malthus, who predicted that population growth in the face of resource constraints would inevitably squelch hopes for a broad-based rise in standards of living. Today, however, there are strong indications that the fog of gloom among economists has evaporated. The evidence of more than two centuries of burgeoning economic growth worldwide is hard to refute, and economists have revised their expectations and models in this light. Economic histories now bear titles like Growth Triumphant; a history of twentieth-century global investment is titled Triumph of the Optimists; and introductory textbooks work through the New Growth Theory, forecasting unchecked economic growth and likening the economy to a perpetual motion machine.

Further evidence that it's time to rename economics the "cheerful science" comes from a recent survey I conducted of professional economists. I found that by wide margin economists are exceptionally optimistic about the future of the American economy: most predict that the robust economic growth of our recent history will continue into the foreseeable future. My respondents' median prediction is that per capita income in the United States will grow at a rate slightly less than the 2 percent inflation-adjusted growth rate of the past sixty years. Almost half forecast a growth rate equal to or greater than 2 percent. Only one economist in my poll predicts economic decline for our grandchildren.

If my respondents are correct and economic growth continues at this pace, incomes will rise more than three-fold in the next sixty years-average incomes would equal approximately $147,000 in today's dollars. If the growth rate does dip slightly, say to 1.8 percent per annum, incomes would almost triple, rising to only $131,000. These predictions are eye-popping.

In addition, economists believe that the U.S. will continue to be one of the world's richest countries sixty years from now. Twenty-eight percent predict that the U.S. will have the highest per capita income in the world six decades from now. The largest group, 71 percent, expects the U.S. to be "not the highest, but in the top tier." Again, only a single pessimist predicts that the U.S. will fall from the top tier.

Finally, economists expect that within the next couple of generations many (perhaps most) countries and regions that are currently poor and economically underdeveloped will achieve standards of living equaling or surpassing today's level in the richest countries. My survey asked: "Sixty years from now what countries or regions (if any) will have joined the group of developed nations with an income per capita approximately equaling or surpassing today's level in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia and Western Europe?" Of those who answered the question, 62 percent put China on the list, two-thirds mentioned other places in East Asia, one-third mentioned India, and 40 percent selected all or parts of Latin America-with Chile mentioned most frequently, followed by Brazil and Mexico. Unfortunately, the vast majority also believe that deep poverty will persist in Sub-Saharan Africa for generations to come.

The bottom line is that most economists are very optimistic about the economic future of almost all the world. They find pessimism implausible because the forces that have driven past growth-the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the strong incentives embedded in the capitalist system that steer us around potential roadblocks-aren't likely to disappear anytime soon. Moreover, the consensus among economists is that climate change has very little potential to slow down our economic growth machine. Rather, economists identify the major challenges facing the American economy over the next sixty years as coping with the effects of an aging population and flaws in the Social Security system, exploding health care and health insurance costs, and our inefficient educational system.

Perhaps it's time for us to stop worrying about a future of deprivation and finally learn how to handle unrelenting prosperity.

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Energy policy: Big, bold and bogus

Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says their energy plan involves "bold steps and big ideas." These steps, if taken, will trod on the necks of American consumers, because Reid's big ideas will counterproductively impose arbitrary mandates on our auto, food, fuel and appliance industries. The latest Senate sham, spuriously referred to as the Renewable Fuels, Consumer Protection, and Energy Efficiency Act of 2007, will actually hurt consumers, reduce energy efficiency and swindle more money from the taxpayers. The misleading title isn't worth repeating; let's just call it S.1419.

A New York Times article on June 12 emphasized lobbying by competing interests relative to the spoils that will be spilled from the federal treasury and the damage expected from this bill promoted by our inept and self-serving, pardon the expression, "representatives." Some say this proposed legislation may be even more divisive than the attempt by the Senate to codify illegal immigration. Former Senator John Breaux (D-La), now lobbying for a corporate management company, called it "the mother of all bills."

And this mother is designed to stick it to all of us.

Sen. Reid says the Democrat plan "is all about harnessing power.." Right, Harry. It's about your power over the hapless citizens of this country. You would mandate phony fuels that will raise energy and food prices; impose government designs on appliances that will increase their costs and reduce product performance and reliability; restrict gasoline industry profits that will interfere with normal market economics and induce shortages; and force arbitrary gas mileage numbers on our auto industries that will make cars more expensive, less safe and reduce our choices. I call this an abuse of power, Sen. Reid.

Apparently duped by environmental utopians, Reid and others spout the "renewal" energy mantra that "exists literally all around us," as he naively states. In their feeble minds grass and grain will substitute for highly efficient "fossil fuels." Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, and many others have debunked the renewable fuels scam that Congress perpetrated on us back in 2005 with what he calls "the biggest energy policy failure in recent years."

Government mandated corn-made ethanol costs more and is less efficient that gasoline. It does not decrease "greenhouse" emissions. It won't reduce "dependency" on foreign oil. It did lead to higher food prices. According to an Iowa State University study, this stupidity has already cost everyone of us in America nearly $50 more for food annually. What will be our cost increase when S.1419 requires four times more ethanol production than the current mandate?-not to mention many other unintended (and intended) consequences.

The Times reports that this onerous proposed law was authored mainly by Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy Committee (more likely crafted by his left-leaning staffers and environmental lobbyists). Experiencing abundant sunshine in that desert-state may have made him light-headed with the idea that we can replace gas, oil and coal energy with such things as solar panels. Windmills will also help us to "energy independence." Picture these people walking around wearing beanies with little propellers on top, symbols of the wackiness they want to impose on us all: doing whatever to save the planet from God only knows what.

Bingaman's bill, clearly divisive, pits various segments of our economy against each other-reason enough to declare this bad law. Government restrictions and subsidies create lobbyists representing business groups who know the economic damage that will be inflicted by do-good, know-nothing regulation and taxation. For example, former Democrat representative Charles Stenholm from Texas now lobbies to protect oil producers and cattle ranchers from the unfair federal subsidies given to corn-made ethanol producers.

The food industry has fired off a letter warning the senators-ignorant or disdainful of our economic system-that their heavy-handed subsidies for ethanol will increase the cost of food to consumers. Energy-consuming companies are broadcasting TV ads pointing out to our resident subversives that our foreign enemies support Congressional self-inflicting attempts to hurt our economy. Naturally, our auto industry fights government actions that will subvert their struggles to provide Americans with high-quality and safe vehicles competitive with foreign makers. Electric utilities and coal producers oppose government requirements to force them to produce 15 percent of the power we all need with "renewable"-read, costly and inefficient-energy sources.

While the dim-bulbs in our Capital inflict us with requirements to use more renewables, they have restricted sugar-based ethanol imports from Brazil; guaranteeing a market for one of their favorite domestic charities. Mr. Lieberman believes that ethanol subsidies will eventually cost each American household $200 "for the privilege of higher fuel and food prices." He also documents that by forcing us to buy reduced energy use appliances we can expect poor performance and more expensive machines we need to maintain our already efficient and comfortable standard of living. Harry Reid and Senate meddlers would change that by bureaucratically giving "efficiency priority over everything else," says Lieberman.

And what will this misguided policy do to our safety on the highways? Lighter personal vehicles necessary to meet government Corporate Average Fuel Economy, arbitrarily picked to achieve some unknown (and unjustified) reduction in vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide, will likely increase deaths on the highway. The National Academy of Sciences believes downsizing vehicles has resulted in annual deaths matching the numbers of our soldiers killed in Iraq over the past several years. The market will produce smaller vehicle for those consumers willing to buy them. We don't want government forced price increases, limited choice and greater safety risks.

Finally, S.1419 will make it a crime to profit from selling gasoline to us. If a company charges an "unconscionably excessive price" for its product, government power kicks in and kicks us consumers. Make no mistake, this draconian action will slow the free flow of this critical commodity and result in shortages. Mr. Lieberman says the "vague and subjective phrasing" in this bill will effectively result in price control and reduce supplies. Even the government Federal Trade Commission "is on record stating that such legislation is a bad idea," says Lieberman. If our legislators can't write clear and concise law, they have no business doing so.

This Senate bill is so potentially destructive to our comfort, convenience and economic welfare that it cannot be defended with rational debate. Wild conjecture, unreasonable emotion and subversive intent drives this legislation. Mr. Lieberman says, S.1419 "is so counterproductive it would need substantial improvements just to be ineffective."

This bill must be buried quickly, or we all will suffer from the plague it will spread.

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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 generally 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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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