PrintDecember 7, 2009
Donald Kennedy and the Corruption of Science Magazine
Science magazine has been stewing so long in the global warming bouillabaisse that its very brains are beginning to smoke. That may be because its august editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy (until last year) was a dedicated warm-monger. Science is the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the political lobby for Big Science in Washington, D.C. The editor-in-chief of Science is like the Queen of England: It's the closest thing to God in the church hierarchy. Everybody kisses your butt, and all you have to do is wave your hand to the cheering peasantry from your golden coach.
Try a Google search for "Donald Kennedy AND global warming" and you get almost six million hits. Search for "global warming" in Science magazine itself, and you get 2,792 citations -- almost as many as you get for "increased science funding."
Here are some Science magazine headlines in the last several years, a period when we know that atmospheric temperatures were flat or declining. As MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen just wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre." The unfortunate tendency of the atmosphere to stop warming is, of course, why Phil Jones and the CRUdocrats were trying to "fix" the data in their infamous e-mail exchanges.
During this time, Science magazine published thousands of references to global warming, including headlines like:
CLIMATE CHANGE: Taming the Angry BeastKen CaldeiraScience, 17 October 2008 322: 376-377 (in Books) ...What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How... (human) activities have triggered the possibility of catastrophic climate change, how we have come to recognize the threat.CLIMATE CHANGE: IPCC Report Lays Out Options for Taming Greenhouse GasesJohn BohannonScience, 11 May 2007 316: 812-814CLIMATE CHANGE: Global Warming Is Changing the WorldRichard A. KerrScience, 13 April 2007 316: 188-190How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?Gerald A. Meehl, Warren M. Washington, William D. Collins, Julie M. Arblaster, Aixue Hu, Lawrence E. Buja, Warren G. Strand, and Haiyan TengScience, 18 March 2005 307: 1769-1772Global Warming and the Next Ice AgeAndrew J. Weaver and Claude Hillaire-MarcelScience, 16 April 2004 304: 400-402
Et cetera, ad nauseam. It's not a pretty sight.
Things only get worse when we look at the Eurekalert site, which is also run by the AAAS. Eurekalert presents an endless flow of press releases from universities that make billions from federal grants. This is where our pop media get their scientific news.
Here are some search results:
Global Warming: 2,500 hits
Climate Change: 5,140 hits
CO2 Global Warming: 2,498 hits
Anthropogenic: 338 hits
Catastrophic: 1,213 hits
Apparently, a lot of PR guys and gals were mining this little vein of gold. Remember Goebbels' slogan that "a Big Lie repeated often enough becomes the truth"? This is the Big Lie Repetition Machine. All your average journalist has to do is go to Eurekalert, search for "catastrophic" or "global warming," and copy the latest headline. Since the media are firing human "journalists" these days, they might as well get a computer program to do it.
It was Donald Kennedy who initiated the Science magazine State of the Planet issues to drive home the Global Warming meme. In an editorial in the 6 January 2006 issue of Science, he wrote, "The consequences of the past century's temperature increase are becoming dramatically apparent in the increased frequency of extreme weather events ..."
The only trouble: It wasn't true.
As skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote in a letter to Science that somehow passed the censors:
Over recent decades, the IPCC found no long-term global trends in extratropical cyclones (i.e., winter storms), in "droughts or wet spells," or in"tornados, hail, and other severe weather"... A recent study by the International Ad Hoc Detection and Attribution Group concluded that it was unable to detect an anthropogenic signal in global precipitation. (Science, June 9, 2005, Letters)
But Mr. Kennedy's mind was made up, and mere facts could not change it. In his editorial on The Breakthrough of the Year for 2005, Kennedy wrote:
An especially significant runner-up (to the Breakthrough of the Year for 2005) was climate change. 650,000-year-old ice cores from Antarctica give a continuous record of correlations between atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane and the temperature changes imposed by glacial cycles. New information put to rest the idea, popular with those skeptical about global warming, that satellite measurements, in contrast to ground measurements, showed cooling. One by one, holes in the global warming case are being filled. Government actions should follow; of that, I'll say more in the first Science issue of the new year. (http://www.sciencemag.org/ Science, Vol. 310, 23 December 2005)
So guess who was instrumental in getting Donald Kennedy appointed to that plum job at Science magazine? Yes, it was our old friend Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb of 1968 -- the one that sputtered frighteningly for decades but never went off. It was Paul Ehrlich who wrote the major puff piece for Donald Kennedy, introducing him as editor-in-chief of Science mag, the most powerful job in American science. (See http://www.sciencemag.org.)
Are you beginning to suspect a setup? Uh-huh...
I know a liberal who fell for The Population Bomb three decades ago and still believes it today. Liberals never have to change their minds, especially about facts. Certainly Ehrlich never changed his mind, and when his predictions about planetary doom failed, he didn't come to the obvious conclusion that I must have been wrong. He just added more epicycles to his pleasingly complicated picture of the climate. That little sentence -- "I must be wrong" -- is the most important one in the entire vocabulary of honest scientists, of whom there are still a few lonely souls wandering over the blasted heath of Big Academia.
It seems that Ehrlich and Kennedy are good buds. Neither of them are scientists -- but they do play them on TV, in the media and at Stanford.
Donald Kennedy was Commissioner of the FDA for Jimmy Carter in the seventies, and he hasn't stepped into a lab since that time as far as I can tell from his publications -- none are based on empirical evidence. All he writes are editorials. Instead, Professor Kennedy returned to being head of Biology at Stanford University.
If you look up Kennedy's bio on Wikipedia, you'll see it's been airbrushed in Stalinist fashion -- it's only a few short paragraphs, with a big notice that Wikipedia does not allow disputed material to appear about living persons. That suggests that somebody wanted to cite some critical facts, but Professor Kennedy objected. I wonder why.
One likely reason is the infamous Stanford University Overhead Scandal. "Overhead" is what universities charge the government over and above the cost of supporting research: In the evil corporate world, it's called "profit margin." Of course, universities would never think about making profits, which is why their tuitions and overhead charges to the Feds have been going up and up and up. Barred from making profits, all they do is raise their salaries and pensions and pad their expense accounts. They're in bed with a monopoly -- the federal science bureaucracy -- so they charge monopoly prices.
Well, Donald Kennedy as President of Stanford was caught dipping a little too deeply into the honey pot -- some business about seven-thousand-dollar bed sheets for the presidential residence and overbilling the Office of Naval Research two hundred million dollars. Small stuff. But the U.S. Congress took notice and called Donald Kennedy on the carpet. Mr. Kennedy defended every penny of his charges and resigned. That's when his good friends like Mr. Ehrlich got him his job at Science mag.
Everything about Science now smells fishy. The scientific blog world should be searching through journal websites -- Nature, Scientific American, The Lancet, National Geographic, the lot -- to see how deeply they are quagmired in the honey pot of global warming. They all have websites with search engines. Public exposure may help them to clean out that pervasive stink of rotten fish.
The decay goes far beyond the CRUddites in Britain; it's all over the world among the machine politicians of science. All of them knew what was going on with the biggest science scam in history because it should be obvious to a child of six. Undergraduates in calculus classes learn that nonlinear dynamical systems are impossible to analyze. Introductory physics classes learn there is no solution to the three-body problem, and the atmosphere is a lot more complicated than just three asteroids cycling around each other in space. Metereologist Edward Lorenz rose to fame in science by dramatizing the nature of chaotical systems -- physical systems that cannot be predicted from their initial conditions. The weather is one of the best examples, but earth sciences and biology are full of them. So no sane scientist or mathematician could have believed the global warming scam. If any of them say they believe it today, he is either lying or incompetent.
Global warming is like political correctness: everybody knows it's a lie, but nobody is allowed to say it in public.
This is a sad time for decent science.
But on the other hand, it's springtime for fraudocrats.
