DISHONESTY IN SCIENCE

Access to Energy keeps reviewing the facts about the enviro scams that falsely allege global warming, ozone destruction, forest depletion, and whatever else is politically correct. Our back issues and good reading recommendations already contain more than enough information to discredit these claims. Why, however, do mediocre scientists keep repeating these myths? Why, also, are most good scientists silent about them? Moreover, what is the scientific community going to do as further research accumulates to show that these myths which it promoted - or at least tolerated - are deliberate falsehoods?

"No: Doomsayers are just trying to scare money out of the government'' by S. Fred Singer, Insight, September 4 (1995) pp 19-21 reviews some of the dishonesty in the global warming industry and correctly links this behavior with the current $2.1 billion annual U. S. tax-financed expenditure for "global-change'' research. There is big money in global lies, and a surplus of people willing to tell whatever lies are necessary to continue receiving that money - money that is taken by force or threat of force from the men and women who earned it. Also, there is a surplus of government bureaucrats and politicians who are are happy to do the taking as long as they receive a portion of the loot (and the prestige and lifestyle that it buys) as it goes past.

"Peer Review After the Big Crunch'' by David Goodstein, Ameri-can Scientist 83, September-October (1995) pp 401-402 discusses some of the pressures that have caused an increase in dishonesty in science with special reference to breakdown of the peer review system. David Goodstein is vice provost and professor of physics at Caltech and one author of the two physics texts we have been recommending for self-teaching home schools (see "Verbalize'' in Access to Energy

22, No. 10, June 1995 p 1). He points out that the exponential increase in resources for scientific research, which was fed by enormous increases in tax money during its latter decades, ended about 1970. Since then, too many people who are in the business of "science'' (we cannot call the majority of these people real scientists) have been scrambling for shares of the static to slightly decreasing amount of money available. Increasing numbers of these people are willing to discard scientific integrity in order to preserve their place at the trough.

"A Fickle Sun Could Be Altering Earth's Climate After All'' by Richard A. Kerr, Science 269 (1995) p 633 is illustrative of the sort of articles that are starting to appear with respect to everything from AIDS to ozone. Correctly reviewing a research paper that shows a strong correlation between solar flux and atmospheric pressure (remember those tiny barbells discussed on pages 2 and 3 which exert more pressure as they get warmer and therefore hit the objects around them with greater frequency and velocity), Kerr manages to open this article, however, with the politically correct and very dishonest statement, "No, there's still little evidence that a brightening sun drove the last century's global warming, as some greenhouse skeptics argue.'' Remember, the small increase in global temperatures during the past century occurred before the release of most of the dreaded CO2, and no increase at all has been observed in satellite temperature data for the past 15 years. (See Access to Energy 22-9 p 3. 22-1 pp 1-3, and

21-8 p 4.) There is no evidence whatever that increases in greenhouse gases have caused significant or even measurable increases in global temperatures during the past century. Such warming probably does exist, but is apparently of minor importance and not yet measurable, whereas there is evidence that fluctuations in the sun are important. The procedure here is, when the truth becomes inescapable, to slip it into the literature gradually along with repetitions of the original lies. The taxpayers are supposed to be so busy earning more money for the tax collectors that they do not notice the shifting argument.

It is important to realize that many honest scientists are institutionally trapped into silence on these issues. As soon as a research institution, even one with a large endowment of private money, has a significant number of tax-financed people, all of its scientists feel peer pressure to avoid endangering the money of the tax-supported group.