About Lysenko, Pseudo-Science And CO2.

My old mate Ronnie Kitching is a prolific letter writer, and this one gives a new perspective to the GW debate: -

Recently English Historian Paul Johnson wrote that the climate change bandwagon is like Marxist or Freudian science. A closer parallel might be with Lysenko pseudo-science.

Lysenko was an insignificant agriculturalist who thought he had a new way of developing crops that would vastly increase food production in the starving Russia of Stalin. It was called vernalisation, and included treating seeds before cultivation to affect their behaviour.

Significantly, Lysenko introduced his ideas first through politics, and had heavy political backing. Russian “intellectuals” inferred that his idea had a Marxist backing, because it claimed biology could be modified in the way that communists wanted to control people's behaviour.

Lysenko, through politics became a cult leader, whose ideas impressed the politburo and peasants.

He demonised conventional genetics. Opposition to Lysenko was not tolerated, and was labelled 'bourgeois' or 'fascist'. With Stalin's blessing numerous geneticists were shot, and others exiled to Siberia.

Dark green anti-industrial climate change ideology, like Lysenkoism, is much more attractive for politicians and “true believers” to follow than the study of real science.

The modern Lysenkos are Nicholas Stern in Britain and Ross Garnaut in Australia. Both Stern and Garnaut make it clear they are not scientists and have based their conclusions on the farcical IPCC reports.

Paid and encouraged by political leaders, both continue to make public statements warning about the increasing dangers of climate change as if they were experts. This merely keeps their reports in the public eye, and echoes the pseudo science of Lysenko.

Ronald Kitching

Lysenkoism refers to an episode in Russian science featuring a non-scientific plant-breeder named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

Lysenko was the leading proponent of Michurianism during the Lenin/Stalin years. I.V. Michurin, in turn, was a proponent of Lamarckism. Lamarck was an 18th century French scientist who argued for a theory of evolution which was based on the idea that changes were based on inherited learned behavior of ancestors.

Natural selection on the other hand argued that those life forms with better genetic traits to cope were better able to pass on their genes therefore the species evolved.

Lysenko, through mixing in a bit of good old ideology was able to persuade the leaders that genetics was not scientific, holding back Soviet agriculture for decades.

Theocratic ideology held back European science for hundreds of years. The literal translation of the Bible caused the church to favor the idea that we as ‘Gods creation’ would naturally be placed at the centre of the universe. Thus despite earlier civilizations knowing how things stood scientists were persecuted for questioning the conventional thinking of the day.

Political correctness worming its way into science is a worry.

Politics is based on the ideology of statism, that is that all human activities come within the role of the state and the government has the right to control them. Government will always seek greater control over human activities, therefore the idea of climate change being any sort of natural phenomenon, could not survive when Al Gore has come up with one that says it is all our fault, even though it had traction while there was no alternative explanation.

The state cannot control the weather while it is a natural phenomenon, so naturally a theory that there are aspects of the weather that are caused by humanity, has a distinct appeal to institutionalized control zealotry. They can do all sorts of things to ‘save’ us that we would not accept if it were not for the ‘threat’ to the climate.

Such a theory gives them scope for a whole raft of new and different taxes, excuses for rationing a vast range of products, controlling our movements, hobbies, recreational pursuits, criminalizing our skepticism, and of course gives them the argument that their opinion that some of us are ‘environmentally irresponsible’ is an excuse to argue that it is a ‘crime against humanity’.

Yep, in the eyes of the state, its proven.