Environmentalism: the science with no basis in science

By Tim Dunkin

Americans have a high regard for science, despite the stereotypes about the capacities of American students in this set of fields. Our nation is still one of the leading producers of scientific advancement, publication, and technological spinoff from pure and applied research. This regard for science, in fact, is most concentrated among conservatives and liberty lovers – exactly that set of people who are most grounded in reality and who understand that the world works according to laws the govern our physical world and which are not subject to wishful thinking. While many people who have fed at the "conservatives hate science!" hog trough may find my statement unbelievable, and perhaps even a bit scandalous, it is nevertheless true. Indeed, a recent study by a professor at Yale found that Tea Partiers were more likely to display a knowledge and understanding of scientific principles than the general population. This result surprises only those left-wingers who get their information about conservatives and liberty lovers from their own little insular bubble of left-wing white noise sources.

What is ironic is that those on the Left – who pat themselves on the back for "believing in science" while oftentimes knowing very little about it – are the ones who approach the issues from an unscientific mindset and viewpoint. Indeed, those on the Left are the ones who generally approach scientific issues with what one might call the "wishful thinking," or even "magical," mindset. Most liberals approach scientific matters with the attitude of "our worldview says this has to be this way, so we will ignore anything that contradicts this." They do this with gun-related issues, choosing to ignore all the evidences that gun control does not work to stop crime but that armed citizens do. This is their approach to economics, completely ignoring the visible evidences of the failures of socialism, nationalized health care, wealth redistributionism, and the rest. And this is how they approach science – the physical world, according to liberals, ought to bend to conform to left-wing ideological preconceptions rather than working as it actually does.

When liberals accuse conservatives and liberty lovers of "opposing science," what they really mean is that we're disagreeing with left-wing ideas about what science "ought" to say, rather than the empirical facts on the ground of what it actually says.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the general set of fields known as environmentalism. Since the 1960s, the Left has worked arduously to invest environmentalism with cloaks of authority and sanctity. Springboarding from the respect that the average person has for "science" as a concept, environmentalists have sought to give themselves that same respect, even though much of their "science" is in fact contradicted by genuine scientific discovery. This is papered over, however, by the sanctity that they seek to give to their belief system, such that disagreement with it or criticism of it is not to be viewed just as a difference of opinion, but the rankest of religious heresy and apostasy. Michael Crichton was entirely correct when he argued that environmentalism is really a religion. Today, "going green" has reached the point of being a religious obligation, and there are many proponents of this new secular religion (such as Al Gore) who have even advocated punishment for those who stray from the straight and narrow way.

In almost every prediction that environmentalism has made, it has been wrong. The earth did not turn into an overpopulated, resource-starved wasteland by 1985. The global cooling that was so stridently warned in the 1970s did not materialize. The Alaskan coastline where the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred was not uninhabitable for a hundred years, but was actually back and more filled with life than before just ten years later. It has all given the appearance of being nothing more than ideologically-driven fear-mongering designed to pursue a particular political agenda.

This state of affairs would almost be comical, if it were not for the fact that environmentalism is such a dangerous, anti-human, death-creating belief system. The predictions that environmentalism makes, though they almost always fail to come to pass, nevertheless are pushed as vital reasons for doing something right now!!! The false sense of urgency created by environmentalists is used to push weak-willed politicians into actions that end up being detrimental to the lives and fortunes of millions.

As far back as 1962, this was the case. This was the year that environmental biologist Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published, a book that was long on hysteria while being short on facts and evidence. In it, Carson argued that man-made pesticides and other agrochemicals were an existential threat to both human life and the environment. In fact, most of her predictions were wrong, and acting on her unscientific arguments has actually done tremendous harm, both to humanity, and to the earth that Carson professed to be protecting. As governments acted on her warnings to ban or limit the use of certain types of pesticides and other agrochemicals, the result has actually been that in many places, crop yield per acre has been reduced, requiring more land to be devoted to agriculture, which results in more erosion, sedimentation in rivers, etc, which in turn harms the ecosystems environmentalists supposedly want to preserve. Further, with the ban on pesticides and the rise of "natural, organic" farming, the quality and volume of food has declines – we have less of it, and it is most pest-ridden. Due to supply and demand, this has contributed to the rise in worldwide food prices, and has helped to worsen the problems of food transportation and distribution to places habitually wracked with famine.

The almost worldwide ban on DDT that was a direct result of Carson's book resulted in the spread of malaria all around the world, resulting in the deaths of millions as many regions no longer had an effective means to control the mosquitoes that spread malaria. In a very real sense, Rachel Carson and her compatriots are responsible for more deaths worldwide than Adolf Hitler.

This is not the only area where the environmentalists have done great harm. Another of their traditional hobbyhorses has been "overpopulation." Environmentalists believe that the earth is hurling headlong to destruction because we are simply reproducing so much that there will not be enough space, food, or resources to sustain everybody. Some United Nations predictions say that earth's population could reach 11.5 billion by 2075, and a mindboggling 28 billion by 2150. Of course, this is not the case – in fact, the rise in the earth's population has been leveling off, and more reasonable predictions suggest that the total planetary population will peak at around 8.5 billion by 2030, due to the fact that fertility rates are dropping worldwide. While this sounds like a lot, we should keep in mind that with modern Western intensive farming techniques and just the land currently available for cultivation (which does not mean that all of it IS being cultivated), we could produce enough food to feed all of these mouths and to spare, provided the logistics of transportation and distribution were worked out.

Nevertheless, "overpopulation" is the root justification for the left-wing theme of "sustainable living." What this term describes is essentially the reduction of lifestyle to a pre-industrial level: stop using electricity and fossil fuels, stop eating so much, stop taking up so much space with your horrible, mass produced McMansions, and so forth. The Left wants to essentially destroy our industrialized economy in the name of "sustainability." All these things like "industry" and "power plants" and "automobiles" and whatnot harm the earth and use up resources. With so many people due to overpopulation, we have to "scale back" so that all those people don't end up stripping the earth bare like a horde of locusts. Of course, none of this is remotely happening, and indeed, as industrialization increases and living standards have risen globally, we've found that technology has helped us to reduce the resources needed per person, even as more resources are found and obtained more efficiently.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the efforts by the Left to reduce world population. The Left loves the idea of advancing abortion around the world. There are reports that vaccines in India and elsewhere have actually been used to introduce life-threatening illnesses and reduce population. Indeed, "population control" is a major theme on the Green Left, going as far back as Paul Ehrlich's calls for massive population reduction in his book The Population Bomb. There are even a few extremist environmentalists who advocate forcible, violent reduction of the earth's population to around 500 million (which would make Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot together look like rank amateurs).

All of it premised on shoddy, unsubstantiated, and indeed unsubstantiable "science."

Of course, one of the most well-known modern environmentalist myths hiding behind the label of "science" is that of anthropogenic climate change, known colloquially as "global warming."

Global warming is embedded in the Western psyche as the premiere "threat" to the world today. The argument for global warming rests on the premise that as CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels have risen in the earth's atmosphere beginning with the advent of Industrial Evolution, the earth's temperature has been rising due to the greenhouse effect. Supporting this argument was "data" which supposedly gave a neat "hockey stick" graph that purported to show that the earth's climate change had reached a critical point where temperatures are now rising much more rapidly, and will result in the melting of the earth's ice cap, raising sea levels over 60 meters and wiping out coastal areas – many of them heavily populated – all over the world.

A funny thing happened on the way to Waterworld, however. A few years ago, the debate about global warming was rocked by revelations that several of the most prominent scientists involved in the study of climate change had deliberately manipulated, and in some cases produced out of whole cloth, the data that supposedly supported concerns about global warming. The "hockey stick" was an invention not substantiated by actual scientific observations. Indeed, the release of the release of the "Climategate" emails demonstrated that many of these scientists knew that the data substantiating global warming were weak and unsubstantiated, but that they chose to misrepresent the data so as to further their political agenda. Despite furious spinning from left-wing activists, the Climategate scandal essentially destroyed the foundations for the global warming argument, as any reasonable person who is actually interested in facts and truth could see.

The arguments for global warming were largely based on computer models, rather than actual observation. And as with any computer model, its predictive power is only as good as the information fed into it. These models suffered from the GIGO principles – garbage in, garbage out. Climate scientists were feeding in erroneous, manipulated date so that they could obtain the frightening, heart-stopping figures for rapid heating of the earth needed to support their apocalyptic predictions. It was all smoke and mirrors from the beginning.

In recent years, the global warming hypothesis has taken further hits as more and more data about the earth's climate are gathered. As it turns out, the earth is not engaging in out-of-control warming due to man's industrialization and burning of fossil fuels. Instead, the earth is in the midst of a 17 year "pause" in warming, and the warming that we had seen (which is much less than predicted by any of the models) is due to a natural, 300 year cycle that is unrelated to anything mankind does. This pause is likely to continue into the 2030s. Arctic ice coverage – which environmentalists predicted was going to disappear and contribute to increased sea levels – is actually rebounding, and is greater than it has been in years (indicating the planet is cooler than they thought it would be). Similarly, the Antarctic ice pack has also seen more coverage than expected.

Recent years have seen "extreme weather events" (such as hurricanes, the prevalence of tornadoes, etc.) decline. This is important because one of the predictions about global warming is that as the earth heats up, more and more powerful storms will occur. Yet, as we're observing – the number of tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat days, and hurricanes has been declining in recent years. In fact, the US tornado count is the lowest it has been in quite a while, and the bottom has also dropped out of the hurricane count. Yet, the news media and the environmentalists were quick to jump on Hurricane Sandy last year as an example of a "global warming-driven superstorm," even though Sandy was really a fairly small storm that happened to hit a densely-populated area where the people failed to prepare for her arrival, and was not actually all that unusual in how far north she came, as I pointed out here.

It has gotten so bad for the global warming enthusiasts that many scientists have begun openly criticizing the mouthpieces for "climate change," such as the UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). This brings to the fore another fact that the environmentalists don't want you to know – the majority of scientists in the relevant fields do not actually support the global warming hypothesis, despite the best efforts of the politicians, the media, and the "Warmers" to create the impression that "scientists" monolithically support the arguments for manmade climate change. It's simply not true – "scientists" do not. Indeed, many scientists recognize global warming for what it is – a secular, environmentalist-driven religion that ignores inconvenient empirical evidences, or else adjusts them to fit into the politically correct political position about this issue.

Now, the observant reader may have noticed that there is a common thread that binds all three of these environmentalist bugaboos – they are all used to justify the reduction in our quality of life and to reduce the human population to what environmentalists and the global "elite" consider more manageable levels. All of these things work to that end – "sustainable living," reducing food production, limiting the ability to destroy deadly diseases, destroying access to and use of fossil fuels, eliminating industry. These are all part of the same program, which is to reduce our numbers, destroy our wealth, and eliminate the ability of the common man on the earth to resist the global "elite" and its agenda.

Many conservatives and liberty lovers like to point out the hypocrisy of people like Al Gore who preach climate change and the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels, while flying the world in their big gas-guzzling jets. I don't think people like Gore would even recognize this as hypocrisy. Instead, they would see it merely as a privilege pertaining to their elite station. There is a concerted effort by the transnational elite to enserf the middle classes in the West, and to cull and manage the poorer populations in the third world. That the middle classes are able to live prosperous, comfortable lives apart from the provision of the elites is an affront to these elites. The poorer peoples of the world, in turn, are more numerous, and therefore cannot be allowed to aspire to the sort of living standards that the middle classes in the West enjoy, so they have to be thinned so that they will be more useful as worker drones in the system the elites would like to establish. Seriously – surely the observant reader has noticed that just about everything that the Left and its transnational allies like George Soros do works to reduce the economic self-sufficiency of our middle class and to destroy the productivity and power of Western economies.

We have to stop this agenda in its tracks. We need to oppose the efforts by the Warmers to destroy our economy, reduce our standard of living, and bring our people into economic (and therefore political) slavery. We have to stand up for capitalism, the benefits of science, technology, and industrialism. We cannot let this "science" with no basis in science be used as a weapon to destroy the gains made over the last few centuries.

© Tim Dunkin