An unprincipled university professor whom I knew was once asked why he became a liberal in politics. His reply: "I noticed that liberals were winning most of the elections, and I decided that it was best to be on the winning side.'' There are deeper reasons for much of the anti-technology trend in academia, but trend following is a strong contributing factor. Lacking personal courage and ability to succeed as individuals, many academics simply ride the trends of opinion currently popular at the university - a ride leading to tenure, an easy life, popularity in their immediate circle, and an illusion of popularity outside that circle.

Lately, the global warmers in this crowd have been riding two trends. The first is their usual mindless antitechnology bias, which demonizes, among others, the petrochemical industry and its utilization of coal, oil, and natural gas. This is so trendy in academic circles that being without it is almost the equivalent of being without clothing. The second is actual data from the physical world which, viewed selectively, appears to support the first. On the next page we illustrate these popular trends in figures 1 and 2.

During the oil embargo, when fuel prices suddenly increased and supplies were limited, the antitechnologists called for the rationing of coal, oil, and natural gas on the grounds that the world supply was running out. Inconveniently, the embargo ended, a glut ensued, and real prices have been trending downward ever since. Estimated world reserves are now sufficient for over 1,000 years.

Next, the antitechnologists turned to global cooling - the result, they assured us, of human burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. This time rationing was required to avoid a man-made ice age and the environmental destruction of the planet. As shown in figure 1, a cooling trend was in progress - providing that one ignored the data before 1940. This trend was bottoming in the 1970s when "global cooling'' became popular.

The coolers overstayed the trend. As the bottom formed, however, they changed positions. Now, global warming was the problem - a trend requiring immediate rationing of coal, oil, and natural gas in order to avoid man-made global environmental catastrophe.

Alas, this warming trend ended in about 1980. By the time they organized the first IPCC meeting in 1988, world temperatures were entering a new cooling trend. With help from the United Nations and lots of self-interested fellow travelers on board, however, it was too late to stop the railroad. Cooling throughout the 80s and 90s slowed warmers' progress, but gradually their propaganda machine has built a worry about "global warming'' in the public mind. Now, the members of this mindless cult are dutifully anticipating the long awaited

"greenhouse signal.'' Since, of course, the earth's temperature fluctuates up and down, their "signal'' will eventually arrive. Armed with huge federal research grants to study "climate change,'' they are planning to spot the trend reversal immediately.

In the meantime, their critics are to be kept at bay by another trend which may be called "consensus science.'' The idea here is that natural truth is decided by consensus rather than the scientific method -experimental measurement and rational thought. Moreover, it is not necessary for a consensus to exist. It is only necessary to create the illusion of one in the public mind.

On the current Microsoft Weather web site, a warmer claims that "contrarians [scientists who disagree with the warmers] are outnumbered by about 2,000 to 20. The 2,000 is the number of scientists, experts and government officials . . . '' who participated in the UN

IPCC global warming extravaganza. Never mind that only 78 of these people wrote the IPCC report and that even their offering needed to be carefully edited and modified before it hinted at support for the warmers.

Pictured here, however, is another trend that is definitely not the warmers' friend. Most scientists have been silent on this issue. They are involved in other pursuits and, moreover, speaking up has led to marginalization by the warmers' propaganda machine as a "crackpot'' or a shill for the oil industry.

Now the Petition Project described last month is giving scientists and engineers a method of expressing themselves on this issue - which involves concepts and data that are easily understood and evaluated by anyone with formal technical training. The claim of a consensus is more discredited each day.

Based on current estimates, the first phase of the Petition Project will probably garner between 5,000 and 10,000 signatures. This number must rise much higher. It already exceeds the warmers' claimed 2,000, but we must realize that the warmers have had a free ride for several years during which, according to polls, they have convinced about 65% of Americans. Overwhelming opposition is needed.

So far, the Petition Project has been funded and staffed entirely by private donations and volunteers. It is in need of substantial donations to pay the printing and mailing costs required to mail this appeal to many more scientists and engineers. Please help.

At present, the warmers are winning. They say that the sky is falling, that their goal is to keep it from falling, and that their opponents are greedy capitalists who are willing to let it fall if they can profit. The Petition Project destroys their underlying claim that most scientists agree that the sky is falling. Without that premise, the warmers will lose.  To cause that loss, the trend shown here must be continued.

The degree to which science has been perverted in the service of personal ambitions during recent decades is truly remarkable. There are many factors and circumstances responsible for this. Government funding of research and the general deterioration in personal ethics

throughout American society are certainly two of the principal contributors. Government control of most educational institutions has also had a pernicious effect. When students start life in an atmosphere where cheating and general dishonesty are the norms, their ethics often go downhill from there.

Still, we must never lose our outrage concerning these circumstances. Too many scientists, honest themselves, have learned to ignore the decay that allows dishonesty to grow and prosper.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate this phenomenon for the case of so-called "climate change'' research. The data in these figures is not new. It is available, in the published literature, to every scientist. It is also on the Internet. The most prominent liars in the global warming industry are well aware of this information. These graphs are adapted from "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide'' by Ro-binson, A.B., Baliunas, S. L., Soon, W., and Robinson, Z. W., which was included with the February 1998 Access to Energy. The primary research references and other details are given in that paper.

Figure 1 is the surface temperature record for the United States during the past 103 years. Figure 2 is the lower-tropospheric atmospheric temperature record for the entire earth since 1958 as measured by weather balloons. The horizontal line in each figure is the mean value for the entire record. Also shown are slanted straight lines which are temperature trend lines for the indicated time intervals. These trend lines illustrate the dishonesty behind both the global warming claims and the earlier global cooling claims - both of which have been used by the same "scientists'' to call for world-wide rationing of coal, oil, and natural gas and the technologies that depend upon them.

First, notice that United States surface temperatures and global tropospheric temperatures are both currently at about the mean temperatures for the entire records. No sensible scientist, in possession of this data, would reach any conclusion other than that temperatures have been stable over the period of the record - with shorter term fluctuations and trends occurring as is evident. What, however, have the an-titechnologists claimed? During the 1970s they became "global coolers'' who warned of climatological devastation from the short-term cooling trend that is evident in figure 1. They blamed this cooling on human use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

When, however, the trend reversed, they changed into "global warmers'' who warned of climatological devastation from the short-term warming trend that is also evident in the graphs. They blamed this warming trend also on human use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

Unfortunately for their claims, the short-term trend reversed again in the 1980s and entered a new cooling phase. Now, as is evident from their propaganda, they hope to ride out this cooling period by showing the public erroneous data and disseminating scare scenarios. At the first sign of the next warming cycle, they will announce that the long-awaited "greenhouse signal'' has been received and declare victory.

Meanwhile, a few scientists who would ordinarily never be noticed have ridden global warming to jet-setting notoriety and government grants from politicians who also stand to gain from this myth.

A group that calls itself "The Union of Concerned Scientists'' is distributing propaganda branding anyone arguing against global warming as a purveyor of "junk science.'' Vice President Al Gore has stated that all scientists agree with global warming except for a few "crazy people.'' Meanwhile, Administration hacks roam Montana's Glacier National Park bemoaning the receding glaciers (which are receding as the sun-warmed Earth recovers from the Little Ice Age).

Mediocre scientists like Stephen Schneider at Stanford are jostling for position as leader of the global warming movement - with their eyes riveted on Stockholm and the Nobel committee. This committee has already shown, by its embarrassing awards to the Ozone Three, that it stands ready to use Nobel prizes to advance the political interests of Swedish politicians. No doubt the leading global warmers sleep with visions of a trip to Stockholm dancing in their heads.

It is unsurprising that such dishonesty exists. Mankind has always been cursed with unprincipled opportunists. Depressing, however, is the toleration of this dishonesty within the scientific community.

From here, the issue can go either way. If the warmers win, science will likely enter a long period of decay during which it loses credibility and is slowed significantly. (We notice that, in its recent headlined review of America's best graduate schools, U. S. News and World Report did not even list science as a category of interest.) Alternatively, the community of scientists - in which there is rapidly growing revulsion against the way in which science has been perverted by the global warmers - may be aroused enough to toss this baggage out and, thereby, recover its good name. The enthusiastic positive comments attached to many of the petitions that are being received by the Petition Project indicate that this issue does have the potential to rejuvenate the ethics of the scientific community.

While the warmers' propaganda machine marches onward with its lies that only a few crackpots and industry shills disagree with their claims about global warming, eco-logic, November/December 1997, p 21, available from 1229 Broadway, #313, Bangor, ME 04401, reports: "In a survey of climate scientists conducted by the Meteorologisches Institut Universitat Hamburg and Forschungszentrium, 67 percent of Canadian climate scientists rejected the notion that anthropogenic global warming is already occurring. In Germany, the number was 87 percent. And in America, the number was 97 percent.''

They report, however, that "a separate survey of the official clima-tologists employed by the individual states in America revealed that 58 percent rejected the notion that anthropogenic [human caused] global warming is occurring.'' Notice the benevolent moderating effect of employment by a government agency.

Amid our disclaimers of the myth that human activities are now unfavorably altering the climate, we must not forget that humans can alter the climate and may well, by choice, do so in the future.

More than 15 years ago, for example, S. S. Penner pointed out that global temperatures could be decreased at low cost by modifying the exhaust composition of jet airliners. The temperature lowering potential of this method would be more than enough to counteract even the more extreme predictions of today's global warmers.

Engineers like Penner are people who build things and make them work. If a machine is misadjusted, they devise a way to fix it. The global warming battle is, however, ideological. The warmers have no intention of letting technologists fix anything. They reject technology.

"Malthus, Watch Out'' by Ben Wattenberg in The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 1998, p A22, reports the death of Julian Simon, the foremost world expert on industrial resources and the role of free enterprise and human liberty in expanding those resources. Among his many publications, Julian Simon's book The Ultimate Resource 2, published by Princeton University Press in 1996, is his most recent and definitive work.

Julian Simon wrote that the supply of resources is not effectively finite because resources are created by the minds and efforts of men. His scholarship proved that this hypothesis is generally correct. It is for this reason that the real cost of most commodities steadily decreases as supplies are increased through the knowledge, ingenuity, and efforts of human beings.

Julian Simon's thoughts and writings comprise an absolutely essential pillar of resistance to the population reducers and pseudoenviron-mentalists. It may be that the work of this one scholar is the most important single blow that has ever been directed against the enemies of technology and free enterprise.

Wattenberg writes, "If the real resource was the human intellect, Simon reasoned, and the amount of human intellect was increasing, both quantitatively through population growth and qualitatively through education, then the supply of resources would grow, outrunning demand, pushing prices down and giving people more access to what they wanted, with more than enough left over to deal with pollution and congestion.'' Also, Simon realized that "human intellect could best be transformed into beneficial goods and services in an atmosphere of political and economic liberty.''

Wattenberg also reports that "Julian was a traditionalist. He did not work on the Sabbath, and the Friday Sabbath dinner at the Simon house was always a gentle and joyous celebration.''

It is a remarkable tribute that just the Wattenburg obituary of Julian Simon contains more fundamental economic knowledge than the entire published works of many well-known authorities.

In another obituary in the Conservative Chronicle for March 4, 1998, p 15, Donald Lambro quotes Julian Simon as saying, "We will never run out of the resources we need, because knowledge is an inexhaustible resource.'' If you read only one substantive book this year, make it The Ultimate Resource 2. (It is available in most good book stores and is also in our 22-CD home school curriculum.) Julian Simon is no longer with us, but the products of his mind, in his 200 articles and 30 books, are still available as one of our most valuable ultimate resources.

Julian Simon taught us that our ultimate resource is ourselves - that our country's resources are proportional to the number of its people and the quality of education of those people. Unfortunately, American resources are diminishing instead of increasing.

In population, we are holding fairly steady. Although more than ten percent of our population has been eliminated by abortionists, this has been made up largely by immigration. Without immigration, our population would be falling. The birth rate is below the replacement rate.

It is in education that we are falling seriously behind.

The Wall Street Journal for February 25, 1998, carried a page 1 note and two articles concerning this. "U.S. 12th-Graders Rank Near Bottom In Math, Science'' by June Kronholz on p B4 and "Why America Has the World's Dimmest Bright Kids'' by Chester E. Finn, Jr., p A22, continue the ongoing saga of the educational disaster that has been wrought by socialism in American education.

Nearly four million unionized "educators'' (half of whom are bureaucrats, not teachers) are ensconced on the overtaxed backs of American taxpayers. Lost within this group is a much smaller number of outstanding teachers. These good teachers are largely prevented from doing their work by the socialized educational system.

While it is true that some students still manage to learn in the public schools, in most cases they accomplish this in spite of the schools rather than because of them. The American students still performing best are the 1.5 to 2 million homeschooled students, but they comprise only about 4% of the total.

How bad is this situation? In recent tests, U.S. 12th graders scored 19th out of 21 countries tested in math - ahead only of Cyprus and South Africa. In science, American students were 16th.

Among the top 10% to 20% of each country's students, U.S. students were second from last in math and were last in science - the worst performance of all 21 countries tested.

The tested countries were those in Western Europe plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithu-ania, Russia, Slovania, and South Africa. Had Singapore, Korea, and Japan been included, the U.S. would still have ranked at the bottom.

Of special note is the fact that America's best students are last with respect to the best students of all other developed countries. This destroys the myth that we are producing a highly educated subset of elite students even though our overall average performance is poor.

What do union leaders of the 4 million "educators'' and government bureaucrats prescribe as a solution? They, of course, want more money - even though their budgets (in contrast to their products) are already among the highest in the world.

Decades of efforts have been made to fix this failed system of education. None have succeeded. If any corporation in America had tolerated such a large, complete, longlasting, and comprehensive failure within its enterprises, that corporation would be bankrupt.

At a meeting in which we participated last year, the question was asked, "Should we try to fix this system or bulldoze it?'' My immediate answer was, "Bulldoze it!'' It is just unthinkable to stunt the minds of yet one more generation of American children while we wait for the same people who have repeatedly failed in the past and who are wholly responsible for the current situation - to fail once again.

This is doubly true at a time when technology has recently given us the tools to replace the education monopoly with far superior programs communicated by CD-ROM and the Internet. Electronics has broken the monopolies on information which existed earlier as a result of the cost of information storage and transfer.

We do not need tens of thousands of teachers of mathematics and physics - most of whom are doing such a poor job (not entirely as a result of their personal efforts) that our children are last in the world. We need just a handful of the very best teachers - brought into our homes by the new high bandwidth communications systems.

How do we know who are are the best teachers? Let free market providers make their selections - and the market place will sort them out. Testing, grading, and accreditation can easily be done remotely. This will require significant numbers of teachers - but few enough that they can be found among the good teachers now lost in the system.

It is unfortunate that the computer industry has shown such hesitancy in approaching the education market. Perhaps most of the denizens of this industry are so busy pursuing new technology that they have parked all of their children in public schools - schools that they do not want to admit are a negative in their children's education.

This market is ripe for a revolution. Our 22 CD-ROM home school curriculum is now used by about 25,000 children - and it is no more than the offering of one family and a few friends with little capital.

Socialized education is a $400 billion-per-year dinosaur. With modern technology, the cost of education could be reduced and the quality increased by factors of ten. Within a few years, test scores would be improved, American productivity would be increased, and a huge tax burden would be lifted from the American people. Financial fortunes await those entrepreneurs who have the courage to do this correctly. (None, however, for companies that bring in "education experts'' from the failing system to design products to aid that system.) The most widespread and pernicious form of child abuse in Amer-ica today is the daily incarceration of most American youths in institutions where their sociological development is distorted and their intellectual development is permanently retarded.

"Naturally Occurring Organohalogen Compounds'' by Gordon W. Gribble, Accounts of Chemical Research, March 1998, reviews current research on the natural production of organohalogen compounds -compounds containing fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and/or iodine. Dr. Gribble is Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, 6128 Burke Laboratory, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755-3564. More information is available directly from him.

He reports that, as of September 1997, 2,900 naturally occurring halogen compounds had been identified. These are produced by plants and animals and by other natural phenomena such as volcanoes. One cited paper reports that termites alone account for up to 15% or 100,000 tons per year of CHCl3 (chloroform) emissions. One vent of a Kamchatka volcano was found to be producing a CFC in quantities 400 times higher than background.

Demon CH3Cl (methyl chloride) and similar compounds are produced in large quantities by the 200,000 annual lightning-triggered forest and brush fires. Annual natural production of CH3Cl is 5 to 6 million tons as compared with 26 thousand tons from human activities. These same fires produce 30% of the CH3Br (methyl bromide) found in the stratosphere. Several North American fires were found to be releasing 60 thousand tons of CF2Cl2 (dichlorodifluoromethane).

The enviros are well along in their assault on the last row of the periodic table. The banning of freon and other CFCs is their most infamous victory to date. HFCs, PFCs, and SF6 are now targeted along with CO2, CH4, and N2O by the Kyoto global warming treaty.

These things are, of course, not easily explainable to high school seniors and young voters who, as products of American public schools, have received the worst education in science in the developed world. Is it surprising that propagandists can persuade these people that carbon dioxide is a noxious industrial emission that needs to be reduced?

Petr Beckmann's classic book, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear is still in print in paperback and available from Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306 for $7.95 postage paid. It can also be ordered directly from Access to Energy.

Anyone who has not read this book has missed a wealth of information about power generation and about the associated relative and absolute risks. The book is also a fascinating account of tactics used by the antinuclear industry - tactics being used today by many of the same people against hydroelectric power and coal, oil, and natural gas.

If you like Access to Energy, you will love this book.

 

• "The Great Climate Flip-flop" by William H. Calvin in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1998, pp 47-64, repeats the new myth that global warming will cause a new ice age. Calvin warns, "'Climate change' is popularly understood to mean greenhouse warming, which, it is predicted, will cause flooding, severe windstorms, and killer heat waves. But warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling - a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.'' The climate record shows that current temperatures are a little below the mean for the past 3,000 years and that temperatures during those three millennia have often been higher - sometimes by more than two degrees Centigrade. No climate catastrophe is recorded in the history of those periods. Now the merchants of fear want the public to believe that global warming will cause global cooling - hedging their bets on the future direction of temperatures.
  
  
• "No Middle Way on the Environment'' by Paul R. Ehrlich, Gretchen C. Daily, Scott C. Daily, Norman Myers, and James Salzman in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1997, pp 98-104, opens with a comparison drawn by the authors between themselves and Copernicus and Pasteur. The authors use this comparison to intone that there is no middle ground between themselves and technologists. The technologists, they say, are completely wrong about the expansion of resources in proportion to human endeavors. After having been wrong about virtually every demographic and resource prediction that he has published during his entire career, one would think that Ehrlich would crawl back into his tenured hole and stop predicting.
  
  As pointed out in "The Population Explosion Fizzles'' by Ben Wattenberg in The Sunday Oregonian, December 7, 1997, Ehrlich's landmark predictions in The Population Bomb turned out to be 100 percent wrong even though he appeared 25 times on the Johnny Carson show to sell his ideas. The world-wide fertility rate, 5 children per woman in 1950, has now fallen to 2.8 and is still falling sharply. Europe and America are already below the replacement rate of 2.1.
  
  Meanwhile, Julian Simon's ultimate resources have been churning out new knowledge and productivity and thereby forcing down the real cost of most commodities. Even the amount of farmland in production world-wide has actually decreased steadily for the past 20 years, as productivity has increased. (See Access to Energy 23-7, March 1996.) Having learned nothing from his mistakes, including the famous commodity price bet he lost to Julian Simon, Ehrlich continues to write this nonsense, and mindless magazine editors continue to publish it.

• The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon, Princeton University Press (1996). Read this not only because it offers a superb education in the economics of basic resources and free enterprise, but also as a tribute to a great American.
  
  
• Gilder Technology Report, available from Gilder Technology Group, Inc. and Forbes, Inc., Monument Mills, P. O. Box 660, Housa-tonic, MA 01236. This monthly newsletter is a remarkable window to the expanding world of the telecosm and computer technology.
  
  With 13 million North Americans now shopping on the Internet (a number that is increasing exponentially), personal computers outselling television sets, and information storage and transfer costs diving toward zero, this is a world that no one can afford to neglect.
  
  In the February 1998 issue, George Gilder reports that 13% of retailers are now offering direct sales on the Internet, while 54% now have some presence there. Internet advertising tripled last year.
  
  
• Any book from the Self-Teaching Home School Curriculum for ages 6 to 18 on 22 CD-ROMs available from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, OR 97523, for $195 postage paid.
  
  Yes, I know that most Access to Energy subscribers are over 18 years of age. But does this really mean that we must pretend to spend all of our reading hours with technical books and related news?
  
  In designing this curriculum, we picked the best 250-plus selections we could from the entirety of books published in English during the past 400 years. About 60 percent of these books are currently out of print. They are, however, available on these CDs as 600 dot per inch image files. So, when you print one with your laser printer, it has the same look and feel as the original.
  
  If you insist on feeling intellectual, there are lots of complicated offerings from the great masters. Truthfully, I like to read myself to sleep at night with Horatio Alger books. Jules Verne is fine, too.
  
  Seriously, these books were written by many of the greatest writers and most profound thinkers during the past four centuries. No student should miss them, and most adults will find much in them of value,