The pursuit of science historically has been quite straight forward for the most part.  Hypotheses are put forward, experiments are devised, data are collected, then the key question Can the hypothesis explain the data?  Additional tests are made, peers are consulted, criticisms offered, replications attempted.  It is the first obligation of the honest scientist to try to prove he wrong.  It is no disgrace that improvements are made. Some notable exceptions are known historically, but still these principles were largely followed. 

Nobel physicist Richard Feynman said it best about scientific truth: “Experiment is the sole source of truth.  It alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty”.  Feynman went on to say “If it (the hypothesis) disagrees with experiment it is wrong.  It’s that simple statement is the key to science.   It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is---if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.

(Dr. Richard Feynman, “The Character of Natural Law”, The MIT Press, 1965, p. 156).

More simply if one’s temperature predictions do not match those taken in the field, the computer model is wrong.  Today’s models can not replicate yesterday’s climate, when all of the climate data are known!  Yet we are asked to believe people who claim to make predictions of climate 100 years from now?  Really? The Feynman statements make clear that computer calculations and predictions ARE NOT experimental data. Instead we get exaggerations as happened so many times before.

We saw in the DDT debates in 1972 that the DDT ban came about from exaggerations, dishonest advocacy, misrepresentations of DDT toxicology, carcinogenesis, and health effects on man and birds, etc.  Since the ban between 30 million and 50 million 3rd World citizens have now died from malaria as a result of the misguided advocacy led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Hundreds of millions suffered from the non-fatal effects of malaria. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has reversed this ban, the EPA has not, to this day.  Isn’t it time to reassess the motives and the values of a movement which put upwards of 50 million people into their graves, and injured hundreds of millions permanently?  And some still want to?  Their promises did not match the deadly results, even after 30 years.

We saw similar exaggerations in the proposed EPA chlorine ban in the early 1990s. This also was being pushed by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council and others.  Although chlorine is used widely around the house, (table salt, water purification, bleaches, various table spicing, etc), as well as wide use in industry, the ban was pursued.  Chlorine has been a godsend to public health around the world as an effective disinfectant.  In the United States, typhoid fever rates fell from 20 deaths/100,000 in 1910 to essentially zero deaths/100,000 in 1940. (http://tinyurl.com/yeks4t).  We rarely hear of typhus anymore.   

In the early 1990s Peru caved to EPA and environmental pressures to ban chlorine in disinfecting drinking water.  As a result within months a cholera epidemic swept through Peru killing 13,000 people and making 1.3 million very ill.  Today it’s estimated that 2.2 million children die annually around the world for the lack of clean water (http://tinyurl.com/yeks4t).

Junkscience has been appalling, costly, and wasteful on many fronts of science.  As can be seen from the above examples (there are many others) there is also a decidedly anti-human element as well as pervasive junkscience among the promoters of these activities.  As we’ve seen with the EPA, the corruption of science has reached the highest levels of federal and state governments and formerly well regarded institutions such as the national Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of England.  They, in great measure have gone the way of the lawyers and propagandists into the world of advocacy.  It has become a coin toss as to whether their reports are those of science or advocacy.  These should always be mutually exclusive.

Recently, Bob Ward of the Royal Society (http://tinyurl.com/ootdt) wrote a letter on Royal Society’s letterhead to ExxonMobil questioning the company’s contributions to groups with which Mr. Ward had disagreements.  Mr. Ward expressed no concerns about the $40 billion recently spent by the US government on global warming, and no concerns of the millions more from leftwing foundations.  Mr. Ward, unable to debate serious scientific issues being raised by the under-funded skeptics, was attempting to silence the skeptics by cutting off their meager funding.  Scientific giants from the past such as Galileo must be weeping at the continuing attempts by the Royal Society, the International Panel on Climate Change, etc., to suppress and end scientific debate for political purposes. Shame on the Royal Society for its decent into censorship.

Remarkably, a recent study of climate change from the Danish Cancer for Climate Change reported experimental verification of the physics of cloud formation (http://tinyurl.com/y5kz5f).  For the past 10 years or so, attention was drawn to a curious relationship between solar magnetism, cosmic radiation, and cloud formation.  The physics of this relationship has now been unraveled. 

Cosmic radiation from deep space and the free electrons it produces in the upper atmosphere is now known to be intimately involved with cloud formation.  The cloud formation in turn has a direct impact on global temperatures. A third variable is the variation in the Sun’s magnetic field.  The stronger the solar magnetic field the more it appears to protects the Earth from cosmic radiation. Since the Sun’s magnetic field varies in strength over time, it therefore modulates the cosmic radiation intensity, thereby modulates cloud formation, and subsequently, modulates global temperatures. 

This new and significant climate driver is obviously a completely natural driving force and has not been known until now.  These mechanisms of cloud formation have now been experimentally reproduced in the Danish laboratory.  These findings point out that the well known variations in our climate have significant natural causes having little to do with man’s activities and have been going on for presumably millions of years.  The fact that these findings were published in the Journal of the Royal Society is a delicious irony, given the recent attempts by the Royal Society to suppress valid, if opposing, views of the skeptics (http://tinyurl.com/ootdt).  It is fortunate for science and for all of us that free speech and free scientific inquiry continues in Denmark.  

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is the Director Center for Science, Climate and Environment. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org