Going "Concern": UCS is a corruption of science

If you often read news articles about "climate change," then you've surely seen a group called the Union of Concerned Scientists cited as an expert source. When you encounter such a reference, you might as well stop reading, because what follows will have no scientific validity whatsoever. We know this from the fact that the very title of UCS is a contradiction in terms.

There's a reason why there isn't an organization called the Union of Objective Scientists. A scientist is supposed to follow the evidence wherever it leads him. It's entirely plausible for two good scientists, separately studying the same subject, to arrive at different conclusions. Science does not demand that they unite to get their story straight. There's hardly anything more anti-scientific than a group of self-appointed representatives of science declaring that an issue is settled, and must never be questioned again.

UCS, which was unscientifically founded by Vietnam-era anti-military activists, is really just a political organization that promotes policy changes based on politically corrupted science. Take, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is defying a subpoena of its internal communications from the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. UCS charges that committee chairman Lamar Smith has "attempted to manufacture controversy ... without any evidence or analysis that NOAA scientists 'altered the data'" in a study of global surface temperatures that it released in June.

In reality, there is no disputing the fact that the NOAA has altered its data. The disagreement lies in the agency's characterization of these alterations as a routine process of revising the figures to account for statistical anomalies, as opposed to Republican legislators' suspicion that the changes were driven by political motivations -- or "concerns," if you will.

Until this year, the NOAA had conceded that the rate of increase in the earth's temperature has slowed dramatically since 1998, a finding that basically agreed with the Remote Sensing Systems atmospheric satellite data, which finds no warming at all during that same period. Scaremongers have had to embarrass themselves by explaining away this trend as a "hiatus" within a broader pattern of global warming. The new, altered NOAA data have revised historical temperatures downward, the effect being that recent temperatures are higher by comparison, and therefore that there is no global warming hiatus after all. You don't have to be Dale Gribble to suspect that there's a conspiracy afoot.

Congressman Smith wants to investigate the manner in which the NOAA produced and publicized this new report, to see if it was improperly influenced. UCS decries this as "harassment," as if the workings of a federal bureau were none of the business of the elected representatives of the people.

Lost amid the controversy is what it says about the NOAA's reliability in general. If its previous surface temperature readings were as dramatically wrong as it now says they were, then why should we trust that its revised data are so much more accurate? If UCS were being scientific instead of concerned, it would be as leery of the NOAA as Rep. Smith is.

Once a scientist becomes "concerned," he ceases to function as a scientist. Once he has dedicated himself to a political campaign against manmade global warming, the nonexistence of such a phenomenon is no longer an acceptable option. Any information that fails to conform to his predetermined conclusion is therefore unwelcome.

That corruptive effect is buttressed by the fact that the prescribed remedies for global warming read like a left-wing totalitarian's to-do list: from anti-industrialism to global wealth redistribution, to population control, to vegetarianism, to nullification of property rights under the rubric of "land use change." Far from being an objective geological theory, it is the galvanizing force behind the entire leftist political agenda. After the dissenting voices have all been squelched, the acceptance of these initiatives will be seen as compulsory. It will simply be what must be done in order to "save the planet."

Even if there ever was any honest science behind the belief in manmade global warming, it was immediately corrupted by political ulterior motives. If the NOAA data has been falsified to show global warming where there isn't any, it won't be the first such offense on behalf of the cause, nor will it be the last.

Nor will "concerned scientists" give a flying beaker about it. What really concerns them is not that the earth may be getting warmer. It is that anyone should dare question their pseudo-scientific mandate for building their liberal utopia.

-- Daniel Clark is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a web publication called The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press, where he also publishes a seasonal sports digest as The College Football Czar.

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org

UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS (UCS)

2 Brattle Square
Cambridge, MA
02138-3780

Has consistently denounced American military campaigns
Opposes U.S. development of missile defense system

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization with more than 100,000 members. Seeing its mission as building a “cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world,” UCS takes public stands, purportedly based on scientific research, regarding a variety of political and health-related issues. It opposes genetically engineered foods, condemns SUV vehicles, and proposes measures aimed at combating what it deems the imminent dangers of global warming. It also opposes the vast majority of American foreign policy decisions, and calls for a unilateral reduction in U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles. UCS disseminates to lawmakers and news outlets its opinions about each of these matters, with the intent of ultimately influencing public policy.

Students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded UCS in 1969. “Through its actions in Vietnam, our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions,” reads the UCS founding document. That sentiment continues to this day, with UCS condemning American efforts in the War on Terror and the 2003 War in Iraq.

UCS typically minimizes threats posed by foreign rogue regimes, and challenges U.S. assertions about the intentions and military capacities of those governments. In 1998, for instance, UCS assured the public that American analysts had exaggerated North Korea’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and that the Pyongyang regime was still many years away from being able to develop such an arsenal.

UCS vigorously opposes America’s development of a missile defense system. It also calls for the “adoption of a U.S. nuclear no-first-use policy”; “a U.S. rejection of rapid-launch options, and a change in deployment practices to provide for the launch of U.S. nuclear forces in hours or days rather than minutes”; “the elimination of all U.S. ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, intended for use on the battlefield”; “verified unilateral reductions to a total of 1,000 strategic warheads (including deployed and stored), accompanied by warhead dismantlement”; and “a commitment to further reductions in the number of nuclear weapons, on a negotiated and verified multilateral basis.”

UCS admonishes American corporations such as McDonald’s and Burger King, asserting that the presence of antibiotics in meat used by fast-food companies contributes to large-scale antibiotic resistance. In 2003, bills based on UCS research aimed at prohibiting the use of eight classes of antibiotics in livestock used by fast-food producers were introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate. Soon after, UCS admitted that the majority of its claims were speculative. UCS has also warned of the alleged dangers of genetically modified food.

Another issue of concern to UCS is that of global warming. The organization circulated a petition that drew the signatures of some 1,600 scientific experts demanding that the United States ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

A Union of Concerned Scientists declaration, entitled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,” charges that the Bush administration “has continued to distort and suppress science in pursuit of its political goals â€” despite a plea from top U.S. scientists to restore scientific integrity to the policy-making process.” According to UCS President Kevin Knobloch, “We found a serious pattern of undermining science by the Bush administration, and it crosses disciplines, whether it’s global climate change or reproductive health or mercury in the food chain or forestry — the list goes on and on.” The signers of this document portrayed themselves as objective scientists with no political agenda. But in truth, over half of them were financial contributors to the Democratic Party, Democratic candidates, or a variety of leftist causes. The UCS website offers visitors an online opportunity to register to vote; this service is sponsored by Working Assets.

UCS is a member of the Save Our Environment Action Center, a leftist coalition that describes itself as “a collaborative effort of the nation’s most influential environmental advocacy organizations harnessing the power of the internet to increase public awareness and activism on today’s most important environmental issues.”

UCS has received funding from the Beldon Fund, the Blue Moon Fund, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Compton Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Energy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Scherman Foundation, the Turner Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6631

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