True Politicization

How does one define "politicized?" Everyone likely remembers how the left cried "politicization" over the Bush Administration decision to can several Assistant AG's because they did not follow up on voting rights cases. But every administration prioritizes classes of cases that they want to see Justice pursue. What Bush did was nothing different. That certainly did not stop the left wing spin machine from howling "politicization." But if the word politicization is to have any meaning, it must be something more far more insidious than merely setting priorities. It must mean lawlessness, unequal application of the law, or falsifying facts for political reasons. And we are seeing numerous outrageous examples of it from within the bowels of the Obama and Clinton Administrations - as well as, of course, the MSM.

First there was Elena Kagan, currently undergoing hearings as Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. When she worked in the Clinton White House, in an effort to justify Clinton's veto of a law banning partial birth abortion, she was involved in the alteration of an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology report. ACOG could find no set of circumstances where late term partial birth abortion was necessary to preserve the health of the mother. But Kagan herself added the language 'the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.'" Read the whole story here and here. ACOG amazingly remained silent after the alteration and for years it went not merely unpublicized, but Kagan's language served as the basis for several court rulings. In short, Kagan was part of a major fraud involving the politicization of science.

Then there was Obama Interior Dept. which, a few weeks ago, convened a panel of experts on offshore oil drilling. At the conclusion of the panel, the Interior Dept. forwarded the experts a draft of a report for their approval. Only after receiving the expert's approval did the Interior Dept. insert into the final report the lie that these experts supported Obama's decision to impose a six month moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Fortunately these experts, unlike the AOGC, chose to immediately point out the falsity.

The above are casebook examples of the politicization of science. But then there is politicizing the administration of our laws. If former career Justice Dept. Attorney J. Christian Adams is to be believed, that is precisely what is occurring.

Obama, who promised to lead us into post-racial America, instead has saddled us with a Justice Dept. that uses race to determine whether or not to apply the law. To be more specific, if you are black and engaged in voter intimidation or voter fraud, you may well get a free pass from Obama's Justice Dept. Do see this entire interview:





If possible, even more outrageous is that the Justice Dept. has refused to respond to lawful subpoenas from the Office of the Civil Rights Division seeking to investigate DOJ's unequal enforcement of the laws based on racial preferences. Apparently, the Justice Dept. is not only engaged in unequal application of the law, but holds itself to be above the law.

All of this should be not merely front page news across the nation, but is of the ilk that the press should be harping on until guilty parties are held liable. It is not, of course, because the MSM itself is politicized. Take for example the recent exposure of Ezra Klein's invitation only Journolist-site which brought together some 400 left wing members of the press. This from Andrew Breitbart:

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough. . . .

I think we’ve seen a paradigm shift, and that the March 20 story will be remembered by conservatives as evidence of how the media accepts attacks on conservatives without due diligence. . . .

. . . The “JournoList” is the story: who was on it and which positions of journalistic power and authority do they hold? Now that the nature and the scope of the list has been exposed, I think the public has a right to know who shapes the big media narratives and how. . . .

As we already uncovered in our expose on the “Cry Wolf” project, members of academia and think tanks are actively working to form the narrative used by the press to thwart conservative messages. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was Klein’s “JournoList.”

And let us not forget the participation of Media Matters in the larger picture of intimidation and mockery for any reporter, like Weigel, who dares stray from the one acceptable liberal narrative in the media. Flying its false flag as a “media watchdog,” the $10 million-or-so per year agitprop command center creates and promotes a system of conformity in which it relentlessly attacks anyone who strays from the Soros-funded party orthodoxy.

The deluge of intimidation showered upon the occasional heretic by Media Matters represent another distinct layer in the media infrastructure that ensures true believer liberals are overrepresented and conservatives had better watch their step.

The fact that 400 journalists did not recognize how wrong their collusion, however informal, was shows an enormous ethical blind spot toward the pretense of impartiality. As journalists actively participated in an online brainstorming session on how best to spin stories in favor of one party against another, they continued to cash their paychecks from their employers under the impression that they would report, not spin the agreed-upon “news” on behalf of their “JournoList” peers.

The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised. . . .

So at any rate, if during the Bush years you were scratching your head wondering what the word "politicized" - a word splashing across your screen every few minutes - meant, well, now you have some real world examples to define the word for you. That is of course not the only difference between today and the Bush years. Today, you are hearing the word "politicized" a lot less, if at all. It must have fallen out of favor on Journolist.

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Politicized Science

. . . The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. . . .

President Barack Obama, Memorandum, Subject: Scientific Integrity, 9 March 2009

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Obama strikes the highest of moral poses, yet scratch the surface and you will find no morality underneath. As has regularly been the case with Obama and the far left, the statists at the UN included, the gulf between words and deeds is a yawning chasm. In terms of politicized science, we have been treated over the past two months to:

- Obama's EPA making repeated claims that the science of global warming is "settled" and that regulation of CO2 is the only way to stave off disaster, yet suppressing its own internal study critical of the underlying science and that calls these conclusions into doubt. (H/T What Bubba Knows)

Update: This from CNET News:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels." . . .

(H/T Memorandum)

- Last week, Team Obama released a 196 page report, "Global Climate Change Impacts In The United States" that contains so many inaccuracies and false claims that, as one climate scientist has stated, it would "make Pravda blush." And indeed, one of the major scientists whose data is relied upon in the report, Roger Pielke Jr., has taken the authors to task for wholly misrepresenting his work.

- Several weeks ago, during the House Energy Committee's truncated hearings on cap and trade, Democrats trotted out Al Gore, yet shielded him from testifying alongside Lord Christopher Monckton. Gore, who has long explicitly advocated suppressing dissenting voices on global warming, regularly ducks debates on the topic. There is probably no greater measure of how politicized the science of global warming actually is than the fact that its foremost proponent is unwilling to engage in public debate on the topic.

- The UN International Panel On Climate Change, an organization notorious for its suppression of dissenting voices and for presenting twisted and sometimes outright false data, is preparing for the next round of talks in Copenhagen. A subcommittee on polar bears is meeting now to prepare their report for the conference - but absent is one of the leading polar bear experts, Dr. Mitchell Taylor. He was disinvited because he does not believe carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming. Further, his own findings are that "global warming" is not harming the polar bears, with their numbers at optimum or growing - a truly inconvenient truth that we will not hear at the Copenhagen Conference. (H/T Crusader Rabbit)

When it comes to politicization of science, Obama and the left are bathing in it. They are pushing it to promote the vast expansion of government into, as Speaker Pelosi said, "every aspect of our lives."

The problems of politicized science are obvious. One is that, if acted upon, it will result in the massive misallocation of resources. A person need look no further in that regard than the House vote on Friday to enact a massive carbon tax. The plan will have negligible impact on global temperatures yet will have a huge negative impact on our lives. If enacted, it will drive substantial resources away from productive areas of the economy while, as Doug Ross notes, providing the engine for massive social engineering. Another example has been the disastrous push into bio-fuels. That push has critically lessened world agricultural production and, last year, drove food prices rocketing upwards to a level from which they have not returned.

The second effect of politicized science is more subtle, but equally as destructive. It is that scientific theories and observations that do not fit the politicized paradigm get ignored.

One example of that concerns the growing problem of droughts. According to the global warming crowed, carbon dioxide is the culprit. This from Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University, writing in the Australian:

. . . Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of [carbon dioxide], which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil. . . .

. . . I do not believe for one moment that undisciplined burning of fossil fuels is harmless, but the most awful consequence of the burning of carboniferous fuels is not the release of CO2 but the large-scale injection of minute particulate pollutants into the atmosphere.

Detailed studies led by internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall.

Rosenfeld's research group has shown that humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. Rather, pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

Rosenfeld is no snake-oil salesman. As an American Meteorological Society medallist, he has an internationally endorsed research record in cloud physics that no living Australian can claim to emulate. . . .

If Rosenfeld's scientific interpretations are correct, then southern Australia would greatly benefit from the application of his discoveries. At the very least, Rosenfeld's conclusions should be accorded appropriate evaluation and testing by an unprejudiced panel of peers.

Yet his work so far has been ignored in Australia because it does not fit in with the dominant paradigm that holds CO2 responsible for reduced rainfall in semi-arid regions. . . .

(H/T EU Referendum)

Yet a second example of this same evil could well prove the most disastrous of all. Those who fully embrace global warming are ignoring the signs of a cooling earth and actual cold-weather related drops in agricultural production. See here and here.

I had to laugh in March when Obama excoriated Bush for supposedly "politicizing science," particularly on the stem cell issue - an issue, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out, on which Bush had taken an ethical stand that had nothing to do with politicization. Nothing Bush did begins to compare with how Obama, the UN and the green left have politicized the science of global warming. Indeed, one would have to go back to the Catholic Church of medieval times to find anything comparable. They get away with it because a corrupt media utterly ignores their mammoth hypocrisy. Thus, as Dr. North at EU Referendum notes, the debate is rigged:

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

Welcome, Doug Ross readers.

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An Inconvenient Book

I've posted below on the latest from the Church of the Environmentalists about the ever more dire threat posed by global warming. We are being asked to drastically alter our lifestyle, to accept a tsunami of regulation, and to spend untold billions to meet this threat, even as voices of dissent are silenced and such dissent is chategorized as "criminal."

The history of the politicization of science and the current facts surrounding global warming all suggest that we should be very careful indeed before spending another dollar to "combat global warming."

With that in mind, probably the best investment you can make for Christmas is to purchase Scared to Death: The Anatomy of a Very Dangerous Phenomenon by journalist Christopher Booker and Dr. Richard North, author of EU Referendum, one of if not the most consistently intelligent blog on the web.

This from the EU Referendum should give you a sense of the book:

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most all-pervasive political issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left in the world will be Antarctica.

Inevitably many people have been left bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of the pattern followed by other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international political agenda falls into five main stages.

Stage one, as an overture, came in the 1970s, when many scientists, followed by the media, expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, heralding the approach of "a new Ice Age".

The reason for this was that for three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age glaciation 20,000 years ago, temperatures have several times been through significant swings.

The hottest period since man appeared on the earth, around 8,000 years ago, was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman Empire. Three more centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when Greenland was inhabited and all the evidence agrees the world was hotter than it is today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Age", when glaciers advanced, the Thames froze over, Greenland had to be abandoned, and this did not end until, 200 years ago, we entered on what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such those years between 1940 and 1975 known as the "Little Cooling", when scientific and media sages predicted that return to the Ice Age.

Then, in the late 1970s, evidence showed that the world was warming up again. As we see from many other examples, a scare is often set off when two things are observed together and scientists suggest that one must have been caused by the other.

In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been sharply rising. Perhaps it was this increase in greenhouse gases which was causing the new warming in the 1980s?


Stage two of the story began in 1988, when with remarkable speed global warming story was elevated into the ruling orthodoxy of the time, partly due to publicity given to hearings in Washington chaired by a comparatively new young Senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 60s.

This helped make fighting climate change the fashionable cause of the moment, taken up by leading environmentalist groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and by an array of Hollywood celebrities, from Robert Redford to Barbra Streisand.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because the UN in 1988 set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which from now on was to play the leading role in the whole debate.

Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts from all over the world to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was then prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials, which was essentially a political document, in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report disappeared.

This contradiction was already obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established.

This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence by what became known as "the fingerprinting fraud". But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policymakers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, now US vice-president, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing the governments of the developed world to making drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its unanimous rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best efforts of Vice-President Gore.

One of the less familiar aspects of Gore's career is how he had already by now become somewhat notorious among America's leading climate scientists for the ruthless way in which he used his influence to try to suppress any evidence they came up with to contradict the approved global warming thesis.

Not least of his efforts to rewrite the historical record was his bid to suppress an article co-authored just before his death by Dr Revelle. Gore didn't want to be known that his guru had expressed serious doubts about the supposed consensus, urging that the global warming thesis should be viewed with much more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in past times, such as the Mediaeval Warming, global temperature had been even higher than they were in the late 20th century, long before CO2 levels had started to rise. Even the first two IPCC reports had included a graph conceding this point, But In 1998 came the answer they were looking for – a completely new temperature chart, devised by another obscure young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" (pictured) because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, only suddenly flicking up at the end to temperatures never recorded before.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1, and prominently repeated four more times. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling when CO2 had already been rising, all had simply been wiped from the record.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise very fundamental doubts about how Mann had arrived at his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadian computer analysts, showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shaped graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged (pictured) just as it had looked before. The Mediaeval Warming was back in place, again showing the early Middle Ages as even hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the great global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led politically by the European Union.

In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and President Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified. Climate change had at last hit the top of the Western world's political agenda and the ratifying governments now had to act.

In the past three years, we have seen the EU in particular announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines to produce derisory amounts of absurdly expensive electricity to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced its carbon emissions by 60 percent.

This is a pledge which could only be met by such a massive reduction in Europe's standard of living that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it. All this frenzy of political activity and propaganda has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with levels of CO2 and that, unless mankind takes the most drastic action, our planet is faced with the kind of apocalypse so vividly portrayed by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet in the past year or two, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of huge new question marks beginning to be raised over Gore's alleged consensus. It was not just that every single assertion in his film was dismissed by experts who knew their subject very much better than he did. For instance, Gore claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 feet when even the IPCC itself, in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between 4 and 17 inches.

There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by Kyoto, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly 10 percent a year, with China alone building a new coal-fired power station every four days, and likely within two years to be emitting more CO2 than the United States.

More serious than either of these points, however, has been all the evidence recently accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies was forced to revise his long-influential record of US surface temperatures, showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the ten warmest years in the past 100 were not in the present decade but in the 1930s.

Furthermore scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate much more consistently with the patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of abnormally high solar activity the sun's effect is now weakening again, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality by our politicians as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next ten years will be very interesting.

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