Big Government had a recent column on ClimateGate, offering that it wasn’t the only Progressive Science scam pushed on the public, and states that “Eugenics” is one major global Progressive-produced catastrophe, but there is another example of Progressive Left political maneuvering that crippled a nation and brought the weight of an oppressive centrally-controlled bureaucracy on the heads of honest and diligence scientists, now known as “Lysenkoism.”

The roots of ClimateGate, with falsifying date, suppressing data that didn’t’ support the theory, and intimidating scientists as “skeptics” or even the more blatant, “unbelievers,” is found in the Soviet Union’s past, their embrace of a junk science called “agro-biology” or as Elof Axel Carlson described it, “a toxic blend of politics and pseudo-science.”

Actor and non-scientist Ed Begley, Jr. had a micro-climate-change of overheating when arguing that the only climate authority was “peer-reviewed” scientific journals. He was quite adamant, repeating “peer-reviewed” as often that it seemed to be a talisman, but about two hours too late to have heard the “thud” of the next shoe to drop from what appears to be a ClimateGate centipede, that the supposedly independent and non-partisan peer-reviewed” journals were under heavy pressure and manipulation of editors and selection of papers to refuse to publish anything that countered in any way the ClimateChange narrative, a total usurpation of the scientific process of open review – the system of checks and balances.

“Peer-reviewed,” the world has just discovered, has been nothing of the sort when it comes to the pseudo-science of “global warming”.  Actor Begley’s position of “peer-reviewed” turned out to not have been spoken from standing on solid rock, but from a tree, a precarious perch on a dead limb that was being sawed off as he spoke. http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bighollywood/2009/11/24/ed-begley-jr-loses-it-on-fox-news/ 

But there is nothing new under the sun, and those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. This combination of politics, science and public policy machinations can be found in the career and wreckage left by one man, Trofim D. Lysenko of the Soviet Union.

T.D. Lysenko (1898-1976) was a half-educated man of science; he didn’t finish his studies and remained defensive through his life towards those with better credentials and experience than he. One might say he learned just enough to be dangerous, developing a new theory, “agro-biology” which mixed known processes of agronomy and plant genetics, with theoretical and unproven evolutionary concepts. His theory appealed to the Soviet “New Man” thinking, upending the old orders, a “political” view applied to agriculture.

The Soviets had a problem; most of Soviet agricultural land was more north than America – of the latitudes of Canada, not the reliable American breadbaskets of warmer Iowa or Illinois. They have a short growing season, with no room for error, therefore much of Soviet agricultural plant research was focused on developing hardier and more productive strains of wheat. Lysenko caught the attention of the Soviet central planners when he proposed a radical method that he claimed would shock wheat into developing new characteristics that appealingly would produce a sort of “revolutionary” wheat fit for the “revolutionary” Soviet Union. And, like Lysenko’s education, “agro-biology” had just enough grounding in proven science to be convincing, especially to people who didn’t know anything about agriculture, agronomy or plant genetics. Soviet scientists who worked in those fields took a look, did some of their own peer testing and began demurring.

Lysenko used his rising political power to enhance his data to promote his theory, reduce criticism, remove scientists from their positions, chase them from the field and in several cases, most notably Lysenko’s chief critic and professional competitor, Nikolai Vavilov, the man arrested, stripped of his position and literally sent to a Soviet prison where he died, a broken, innocent man. The rest of Soviet science took note, and shut up. They had to eat, after all. But there wasn’t much to eat after Soviet Central Planning decreed that the debate was over, “the science settled” and the “consensus” was that Lysenko’s methods were to be applied to all Soviet agriculture. Harvests dropped, the Lysenko-processed wheat didn’t produce the results Lysenko had predicted, had published and had promoted – a national, policy-contrived disaster.

The parallels between the Soviet centralized commitee promotion of Lysenko because his rhetoric fit the Soviet Progressive ideology, and “Climate Change” are ominous – the bullying, the falsification of data and the outright professional, political and bureaucratic smothering of dissenting opinions should be an important lesson to recall when presented with ClimateChange data, claims and computer modeling that fly in the face of observable reality. That the environmental movement has such luminaries as former Soviet President Gorbachev who after losing the free election for Russian president with an abysmal 3% of the vote, morphed into a “green” advocate, after stating that the “environmental movement was the last best hope of communism.”  A strategy of going “Green” that would lead to “Red,” should be a reason to closely examine the claims, the direction and the veracity of anything presented by people who have no backgrounds in science whatsoever. The mountain of emails discussing elimination of dissent, hijacking the peer-review process, collusion and obfuscation, and the exposure of the faulty computer codes written for climate modeling shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it’s welcome and concrete proof that “Global Warming” and “ClimateChange” are politics and power, not science or actual weather. This fraud as it still unravels with almost daily exposure of yet more admissions of hiding data, manipulation to produce desired outcomes, is becoming more and more suspicious as a way to create a basis on which massive taxation and redistribution of wealth was going to be justified, negatively affecting billions of people around the world, arguably the biggest single planned theft in human history.

“In other words, the primary task of the politics of science was to ensure that science served the political end of the people and its government.”     The Lysenko Effect, by Nils Roll-Hansen

Resources:  The Lysenko Effect, by Nils Roll-Hansen;    The Lysenko Affair, by David Joravsky
.