Canlorbe: You
say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than
by environmentalists dreading ice melt.
Could you expand?
Dr. Soon: Yes, indeed.
I have argued that too much ice
will be the ultimate enemy for polar bears. Polar bears need
less sea ice to be well fed and to reproduce. Why?
Think about
this for a minute: Polar bears eat a lot.
Any large colony will
need a great deal of food. The bears' staple diet is seal
blubber. But seals are a long way up the food chain. So a fully
functional and healthy eco-system is required.
And that means
oceans warm enough to support the lower links in the food chain
from plankton all the way up to seals.
Indeed, a good puzzle for polar-bear science is to answer the
question how polar bears survived during the ice ages, when ice
covered coastal zones and large parts of the global ocean. Ice
was piled miles deep on land, making it extremely difficult for
eco-systems to provide enough food.
Of course, areas of relative
warmth, which population biologists call
refugia, always exist.
They may well be the key to explaining how polar bears survived
the
Last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago.
The so-called
"environmentalists", who seem to allow unreasoning emotion and
political prejudice to stand in place of rational thought and sound
science, became very angry when I asked them whether they would
prefer to see a billion polar bears instead of the 20,000-30,000
living now.
The real threat to polar bears was unregulated hunting,
which reduced the population to perhaps as few as 5,000 bears in the
early 1970s.
After the
November 1973 agreement to regulate hunting and outlaw hunting
from aircraft and icebreakers, the polar bear population rebounded.
By 2017 it was approaching 30,000. In 2016 a survey by the Nunavut
government found a vulnerable population in the western Hudson Bay
region to have been stable for at least five years.
I should say
categorically that this polar bear fear-mongering is evidence of
mass delusion promoted by
group think.
As a physical scientist rather than a biologist, I
am generally reluctant to get involved in such topics as the
influence of climate on
polar-bear population, health and biology.
But in 2002,
Markus
Dyck asked me to examine independently these strange and
insupportable claims by environmental extremists that polar bears
are
threatened with extinction by
'global warming.'
Consider the facts:
From 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Earth was considerably warmer
than today. Yet the polar bears survived.
In fact, they had evolved
from land-based brown bears some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and
to this day they rear their cubs in land-based dens burrowed into
the snow.
Four dead bears found in
an aerial survey of the Beaufort Sea
(Monnett & Gleason, 2006)
Readers curious
about
Al Gore's false statement that a scientific survey had found
polar bears drowning because they could not find ice should see my
talk on how environmentalists are the real threat to polar bears:
The survey cited by
Gore in his sci-fi comedy horror movie in fact found that just four
polar bears had drowned, three of them very close to land, and they
had died because of high winds and high waves in an exceptional
Arctic storm.
The authors of
the paper were later victimized by their academic colleagues at
the instigation of environmental extremists because they had
stated - correctly - that it was the storm, and not
global warming, that had killed the bears.
What is more, in
the dozen years before the survey, the sea ice extent in the
Beaufort Sea, where the survey took place, had actually increased
slightly. At no point was Al Gore's story true.
In 2007 the High
Court in London condemned Gore for his false statements about polar
bears, whose Linnaean classification is
ursus maritimus - the Bear of
the Sea.
It is now known that they can
swim for more than 100 miles over periods of several days. Al
Gore could not even ride a pushbike that far.
One positive aspect
of my work in science is that I have befriended many seekers after
truth.
A polar bear expert,
Professor
Mitch
Taylor of Lakehead University, told me late in 2017:
Just finished up in Davis Strait
with 275 DNA samples. The bears were in better condition this
year than they were during the 2005-2007 study years.
The Wrangel Island bears in the photo are in good condition, but the
Davis Strait bears were even fatter. Markus [Dyck] has found the
same in the Cape Dyer area.
Local people confirm the bears are
very fat this year and are also reporting a big increase in
ringed seals (immigration, not local productivity).
Keen readers who
may want solid information and frequent scientific updates about the
overall health and trends of all 19 subpopulations of polar bears
should
visit the website of another friend of mine, Dr. Susan Crockford.
Is climate change naturally cyclical?
Canlorbe: Climate
change is surely nothing new. It is a long-established, cyclical
behavior of our planet, which has long been oscillating between
glaciations and interglacial warm periods.
Should we diagnose Mother
Nature with a bipolar disorder?
Dr. Soon:
Earth's climate system dynamically
oscillates between icehouse and hothouse conditions in geological
time or, to a lesser degree, between the glacial and interglacial
climates of the last 1-2 million years.
But, as with many
interesting questions about the Earth's climate, there is no certain
answer.
The data do not support over-simplistic accounts.
Sea level rise - mother of all scares
I was fascinated to
discover that changing sea levels, including extremely high global
sea levels 65-250 feet (20-75 m) above today's mean, occurred during
the "hothouse Earth" era.
One does not need an enormous ice sheet
for sea level to be high, chiefly because the Earth's coastal zones
and ocean basins may be more porous and capacious than one would
imagine. Indeed, deep geological studies proffer good evidence to
support my position.
I included this empirical evidence in
an essay recently co-wrote with Viscount (Christopher)
Monckton of Brenchley.
In addition to the
ever-changing shape and depth of the ocean basins and coastal zone
boundaries, one must also bear in mind the
"leaky Earth":
There appears to be a continuous exchange of
water between the ocean bottom and the Earth's crust, as Professor
Shige Maruyama of Tokyo Institute of Technology has shown.
Sea level has risen
by 400 feet over the past 10,000 years.
For the past 200 years it
has been rising at about 8 inches per century, and that rate may
well continue. It has very little to do with global warming and much
more to do with long-term climate cycles.
In fact, so slowly has sea
level been rising that environmental-extremist scientists have
tampered with the raw data by adding an imagined (and imaginary)
"global isostatic adjustment", torturing the data until they show a
rate of sea-level rise that has not in reality occurred.
The Earth in the
solar system in the galaxy in the universe
My own examination
of the Earth's climate system extends beyond the solar system to
include our place in the galaxy.
When the solar system was born, we
were
1-3 kiloparsecs closer to the galactic center than today. We are
now 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic center.
The solar system
drifts along the
spiral density wave that orbits the center of the galaxy about
every quarter of a billion years.
Sometimes, the solar system
has lain above or below the plane of the galactic disk. Also, we
need to consider the evolution of the Sun from its
thermonuclear-burning core to its outer thermosphere.
Furthermore,
for 4.5 billion years the planets have continued to push and pull
the Sun around the barycenter of the solar system.
It was 13.82
billion years ago that, at the moment of creation that we now call
the Big Bang, 'God' said, Let there be light, and there was light...
The
solar system, including our planet, is thus one-third as old as the
known universe. Our place and time in the universe cannot be ignored
in assessing the climate.
The original proposition to resolve the
Faint Young Sun Paradox by
WeiJia Zhang of Peking University concerned the relevance of
Hubble expansion flow in affecting the mean distance between the Sun
and the Earth over geological time.
One must even consider our
galaxy's interaction with passing stellar systems, especially the
coming merger (in a
few billion years) between the Milky Way and the M31 Andromeda
galaxy to form the
Milkomeda cluster.
This very likely event will occur within the
next five billion years of the Sun's lifetime.
Gravity rules even
over very large distances.
Screenshot of
representational images
of coming merger of galaxies
These are just a
few of the considerations that lead me to insist on being
open-minded in pursuing my scientific study. I study the Sun mainly
to improve my own understanding.
As A.E. Housman's Greek chorus used
to put it,
"I only ask because I want to know."
It's the Sun, stupid!
On
August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been
hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space
at 4:36 p.m. EDT.
The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at
over 900 miles per second.
The CME did not travel directly toward
Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or
magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday,
September 3.
Pictured here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171
angstrom wavelengths. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO
Canlorbe: You suggest
that the Sun's behavior is the driving force of climate warming, not
factory smokestacks, urban sprawl or our sins of emission.
Would you
like to remind us of the keystones of your hypothesis?
Dr. Soon:
For a quarter of a century I have
studied the hypothesis that solar radiation is causing or at lest
modulating climatic variations over periods of several decades.
The
most up-to-date report of my sun-climate connection research is in a
chapter I and my colleague Dr. Sallie Baliunas contributed to a
book in honor of my late colleague Professor Bob Carter of Australia
(1942-2016).
For the more serious science geeks,
a fuller paper, with my two excellent colleagues from Ireland,
the Connollys pere et fils, is worth reading.
If your readers
have any difficulty in finding these works, just
contact me.
-
I have sought the
best empirical evidence to show how changes in incoming solar
radiation, accounted for by
intrinsic solar magnetic modulation of the irradiance output as
well as planetary
modulation of the seasonal distribution of sunlight, affects the
thermal properties of land and sea, including temperatures.
In turn,
temperature change affects atmospheric water vapor as well as the
more dynamical components of
equator-to-pole insolation and of
temperature gradients that vary on timescales of decades to
hundreds of years.
Readers may like to
follow
the original hypothesis of a connection between the Sun and
climate advanced by the team led by my excellent colleague Professor
Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of
Sciences at Xi'an, China.
Our paper examines how the incoming solar
radiation modulates the expansion and shrinkage of the rain-belts in
dynamically active regions such as the Western Pacific Warm Pool.
-
A
second example shows how the Indian summer monsoonal rainfall is
correlated with a specific metric for incoming solar radiation.
-
A
third example would be the research on how incoming solar
irradiance influences China's thermometer temperature records,
showing that over periods of many decades the variations in total
solar irradiance in the upper atmosphere are matched by variations
at the surface.
I regard this
empirical result, detectable notwithstanding the complexities of
cloud fields within the atmospheric column, as of the highest
importance.
We are on the right track after all in investigating
solar radiation (rather than something else) as the driver and
modulator of most things climatic.
The Maunder Minimum
Canlorbe: The
Maunder
Minimum, also known as the "prolonged sunspot minimum", was the
subject of a book you co-authored with Steven H. Yaskell in 2003.
For the layman, would you like to explain the stellar phenomena
observed during this period?
Dr. Soon:
The Maunder Minimum was indeed a very
notable period in the study of sunspot activity or, more
specifically, of the Sun's magnetism.
It lasted from 1645-1715,
covering most of the reign of the Sun King (Louis XIV, 1638-1715;
regnavit May 14, 1643 to
September 1, 1715).
Indeed, the late
Jack
Eddy (1931-2009) was fond of popularizing this fact by saying
that,
"the Sun King's reign appears to have been a time of real
anomaly in the behavior of the Sun".
Another interesting
coincidence is the fact that
Saint-Gobain,
makers of the glass for the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, also made
the mirrors for the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson
Observatory where my colleagues (especially
Dr.
Sallie Baliunas) and I used to study the variations in the
activity of solar-type stars.
From these observations, we were able
to confirm the general Maunder-Minimum-like phase of solar-stellar
magnetism.
I worked with Steve
Yaskell in writing this book as a
labor of love. Our first purpose was to honor the insights of
the two dedicated observers of our Star, E. Walter Maunder
(1851-1928) and Annie Maunder (1868-1947). I also wanted to dismiss
the arrogance and poor scholarship I had noticed among climate
scientists.
Professors Raymond Bradley and Philip Jones, for
instance, had said with great certainty in one of their books that
the geologist Francois Emile Matthes (1874-1948) had originated the
term "Little Ice Age" which is roughly coincidental with the period
of the Maunder Minimum.
However, a little research (see pp. 208-209
of our book) shows that Matthes had attributed the phrase not to
himself but to "a clever journalist".
Only a few decades
before Louis XIV came to the throne of France, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642) and others had first observed sunspots.
During more
modern times, the Maunders, re-examining sunspot records kept at the
Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, established the famous
butterfly diagram that shows the quasi-symmetrical distribution
of sunspots between about 40°N and 40°S over the 11-year solar
cycle - one butterfly per cycle.
What is special
about the Maunder Minimum is the fact that during that period
sunspots barely appeared on the Sun's northern hemisphere and, when
they appeared in the Southern portion, the dark spots were very
narrowly crowded within a narrow band 20 degrees off the solar
equator.
This information is uniquely available thanks to the
impeccable telescopic observations from L'Observatoire de Paris.
My
late colleague, Elisabeth Nesme-Ribes (1942-1996), very poetically
described this period as that of the "broken butterfly wings".
The
butterfly diagrams
of sunspot activity from 1666-1719 (left)
contrasted with 1945-1990 (right).
From J.C. Ribes and E.
Nesme-Ribes (1993)
The sunspot cycle in the Maunder Minimum,
1645-1715,
Astronomy & Astrophysics 276:549, fig. 6.
It is sometimes
said that the Maunder Minimum was merely an illusion or a confusion.
However, several colleagues and I, led by Professor Ilya Usoskin of
the University of Oulu, Finland, were able to
affirm
the reality of the Maunder Minimum by summarizing all available
evidence, including confirmation from the broader phenomenon of
Grand
Minima as deduced from
cosmogenic isotopes and other proxies
for pre-instrumental solar activity.
Astrology vs. Astronomy
Canlorbe: In the view
of many, IPCC's predictions based on computer models are little
better than Tarot cards and astrological predictions.
Given your
expertise in solar and stellar physics, do you see solid reasons not
to regard astrology as reliable?
Dr. Soon:
I am confused by the question.
As a
scientist, I do not see either evidence or any mechanism by which
the relative positions of very distant heavenly objects can assist
us in predicting whether any of us will "meet a tall, dark stranger"
or win the lottery.
However,
an active area of scientific enquiry asks why and how the Sun's
magnetism varies.
It may be that it is modulated by inertial
oscillations within the plasma body of the Sun owing to
perturbations caused by the planets, and chiefly by the gas giants,
Jupiter and Saturn.
But that is astronomy, not astrology. Astronomy
is clearly within the scientific realm, but divination by means of
astrology, just as clearly, is not.
The Sun card from the Tarot of Marseille
At this point, I
wish to say something about the misuse of computer climate models by
the United Nations' IPCC as a supposed "scientific" mode of divining
the Earth's climate over the next 20, 50, 100,
1,000
or even
100,000 years.
Dr. Dallas Kennedy has coined the phrase
"uncontrolled numerical approximations" for all climate model
simulations inconsistent with the observed climate and
insufficiently scrutinized.
The current state
of our understanding of the dynamical evolution and variability of
the Earth's climate, in the observational as much as in the
theoretical domain, is so immature that, as prudent and careful
scientists, we should stop and think.
I am confident that, even if
we were able to find some "agreement" between the outputs of the
current generation of climate models and the available measurements
and observations, we ought to be cautious, because we can be almost
100% certain that the apparent agreement is fundamentally incorrect.
Let us heed the
caution raised
by the world's most knowledgeable atmospheric physicist, Professor
Richard Siegmund Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology:
What historians will definitely
wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic,
obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled
a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly
everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry
was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin.
It will be remembered
as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that
CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to
be a deadly poison.
The Philosophy of Science
Canlorbe: The Sun has
inspired a famous analogy in Plato's theory of forms:
namely, that
the Sun, as the sixth book of The Republic says, allows us to see
material things in the visible world, just as the Idea of the Good
allows us to comprehend incorporeal or abstract concepts in the
intelligible realm.
Any entity existing in the visible world is
intelligible only by virtue of a corresponding Idea that gives it an
order, a sense, and an identity.
And the Idea of the Good is the
divine Sun that allows us, once it is grasped, to know all existing
Ideas in the intelligible world. As a debunker of "scientism", do
you recognize some relevance to this Platonic concept of scientific
inquiry?
Dr. Soon:
I agree with the claim made by
Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) that,
"if the broad light of day could be let in upon men's actions, it
would purify them as the Sun disinfects".
Transparency in all
human affairs, including our scientific endeavors, is essential.
Honestly, I am less
of an epistemological philosopher than a natural philosopher - a
mere humble scientist, or, if you like, a Shakespearean "rude
mechanical".
I subscribe to David Mermin's principle:
"Shut up and
calculate!"
Science starts with quantitatively expressible evidence
and applies to that evidence the honest, careful, disciplined
manipulation of numbers that we call mathematics.
Mathematics, then,
is at once the language of science and its currency. In scientific
inquiry, fully open and objective transparency (especially
concerning the methodology and openness of datasets) is the most
important requirement.
Unfortunately, after more than a quarter of a
century working in climate science, I have seen at first hand that
these simple rules of science are too often honored more in the
breach than in the observance.
To bear witness to
how damaging the flawed processes have been in climate science, I
strongly recommend reading the refined essay by Professor Lindzen
titled "Climate science
- Is it currently designed to answer
questions?"
For more detail on
the level of corruption and dishonesty that prevails in global
warming science, I recommend my recent talk given at the 2017
meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness:
For debunking the popular "scientism", I recommend a serious article
that I wrote with my late friend, Professor István Markó (1956-2017)
for
Breitbart.
There are
scientists and there are mere propagandists. For instance, Bill Nye,
the soi-disant "science guy", is
in truth Bill Nye the totalitarian propaganda guy.
In telling it
like it is about Bill Nye,
Luke Barnes said this:
In an age when a number of
prominent scientists have said profoundly idiotic things about
philosophy, Bill Nye, the "science guy" has produced the
Gettysburg Address of philosophical ignorance.
It would be hard
to write a parody that compressed more stupidity and shallowness
into 4 minutes.
Let me close this
reply on the philosophy of science by quoting Professor Chris Essex
of the University of Western Ontario, from
his review of the book
The
Climate Caper by Garth Paltridge:
Anti-skepticism isn't science. At
best it's a kind of para-science, because skepticism is inherent
to the scientific process.
This para-science is the
unprecedented, powerful, well-funded force, not the
much-maligned skeptics. Even the oil companies go against the
cliché and fund it. It's the skepticism inherent to science that
is embattled. Everything else is delusion and lies.
That is how
the science has been damaged…
Many scientists, including me,
are worried that humanity has been paying too high a price in
subordinating science to these agendas. Years from now,
historians will look back on this period as extraordinary.
The
great social fervor was over something that only seems like
science. It's of science but lacks the heart of science. It will
take generations to pick through the detritus, but this period
will ultimately tell us far more about ourselves than Nature.
Soon it will be over. If doom has not ensued, the climate
science tourists will leave for other errands.
Canlorbe: If I may
somewhat reformulate Rudolf Clausius' statement of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, the total entropy of a sufficiently isolated system,
no matter where it be in the universe, tends to a maximum.
It is not
uncommon to hear that the Second Law is proven wrong by the imagined
history of the cosmos, given the universe, from the very first
particles and atoms to the most advanced human civilizations,
appears to have been evolving steadily towards higher degrees of
order and complexity.
Another opinion is that the Second Law remains
true, although life on Earth, which receives energy continuously
from the Sun and which is not, therefore, an isolated system, seems
at first sight to violate the Law.
As an astrophysicist who
specializes in solar activity, how do you react to the arguments
against the universality and truth of the Second Law?
Dr. Soon:
Before I reply, it is interesting that you raise the name of Rudolf
Clausius (1822-1888), because Clausius' derivation, together with Emile Clapeyron (1799-1864), of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation
between the temperature of the atmospheric space and the capacity of
that space to carry water vapor is critical to the construction of
a proper theory of climate.
As to the
reformulation of the Second Law following its original formulation
by Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), Clausius, of all the citizens of the
universe, understood that life on Earth is made possible owing to
the energy from the Sun. Low-entropy photons begin their journey to
Earth at a temperature of about 6,000 K.
By the time they reach the
upper atmosphere, entropy has already done its work and they keep
the Earth at
a
temperature 20 times less than that at which they began their
eight-minute journey.
To bring this reply
down to Earth (pun intended) and to return the focus to climate, it
has long been realized that strict application of conservation of
energy alone may not yield to the full understanding of climatic
variations.
Starting in the 1980s, an active field of scientific
research was developed by the gurus of the maximum-entropy principle
in climate models, such as imaginative scientists like Garth Paltridge, whose book I mentioned earlier.
If one is interested in
this esoteric subject, there is
a recent paper treating entropy as the emergent primary quantity
for describing the nature of couplings and interactions in the
climate system.
I should also point
out that the theory of greenhouse gas warming does not, as is
sometimes thought, in any way violate the Second Law.
It is not the
theory that is wrong, but the incorrect modeling that leads official
climatology greatly to overstate the warming that will occur as we
return to the atmosphere some small fraction of the carbon dioxide
that came from the atmosphere in the first place.
As you will have
gathered, I am a natural philosopher and not an epistemological or
moral philosopher. My language is not that of theology or of
ideology but of science.
I conclude my answer to your query by
saying that I am simply happy to be alive, following the strictly
unidirectional arrow of time, as proof that the Second Law of
Thermodynamics is sound.
Notwithstanding the
crazy and highly corrupt atmosphere that exists in the climate
science theatre, sensible, solid and active scientists such as
Bjarne Andresen and
Christopher Essex ask meaningful questions and reach for
reasonable answers.
I am content to search for topics in which I can
add to the scientific understanding of the complex fluid dynamics of
the Earth's climate.
Hotheads and hot weather
Canlorbe: People from
South America, Africa, Italy and the Middle East are sometimes
thought of as having elevated testosterone levels and, consequently,
a propensity to solve political conflicts through violence.
These
populations are thought of as being warm-blooded, or even
hot-headed, owing to the hot climates in which they live.
Do you
warmly welcome this hypothesis or hotly deny it?
Dr. Soon:
I am very happy to receive such a
question, for I am always trying to understand the extent to which
life is dependent upon and influenced by the Sun.
Professor John Todd
of the University of Cambridge has recently
published a
paper that focuses on how some 5,135 out of 22,822 human genes
studied for immunity and general physiology exhibited seasonal
dependence on incoming sunlight.
This finding that the Sun directly
influences about a quarter of our genome adds a profound insight and
possibly legitimacy to the broad statements you list above. But far
more importantly, it proffers a proper and scientific approach to
such a question.
This is why it is not a complete surprise that the
2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine was given for the discovery of,
"molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm."
Indeed, for what is
worth, in 1927 Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), on page 9 of his
book
Stars and Atoms, remarked
that the height of a man (2 m) is about halfway between the diameter
of an atom (2 x 10-10 m) and that of the Sun (2 x 109
m):
"Nearly midway in scale between the atom and the star there is
another structure no less marvellous: the human body".
Recent statistics
from 380 sites in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan,
South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and the USA show
that
cold weather kills 20 times more people than warm weather.
What
is more, 90% of the world's species thrive in the tropics, and less
than 1% exist at the Poles.
We must distill the
question to a solvable core and examine it properly through
scientific methodology.
I recently gave
a talk about the powerful
relationships among various co-factors including seasonal sunlight,
seasonal temperature change, sea level, and even tectonic activity
that extends back to the bipolar Quaternary ice-ages and
interglacial warm periods of last 2.6 million years.
Are environmentalists Fascist?
Canlorbe: Although
environmentalist and self-proclaimed antifascist movements obviously
share the totalitarian dimension of Italian Fascism - at least, in
its final version - they may not share the anthropology and the view
of nature that were at the heart of Fascist ideology.
As Benito
Mussolini wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932,
"Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his
energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties
besetting him and ready to face them…
Hence the high value of
culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the
outstanding importance of education.
Hence also the essential value
of work, by which man subjugates nature and creates the human world
(economic, political, ethical, and intellectual)."
Does Trumpian
conservatism or green socialism come closest to the spirit of
historical Fascism as expressed above?
Dr. Soon (with help from Christopher
Monckton of Brenchley):
Fascism, National Socialism,
International Socialism and Communism are all disfiguring and
mutually indistinguishable instances of the totalitarianism that the
political philosophers of early imperial China excoriated as
"legalism" and the French philosophers as
étatisme, intégrisme and
dirigisme.
The contrasting
political theory was and is known to Chinese thinkers as
Confucianism and to us as libertarianism and democracy.
Mussolini no more
acted upon the fine-sounding sermons he preached than did Hitler,
Lenin, Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung.
Each of these monsters, whatever they
may have preached about the importance of science, showed the same
propensity to interfere with it, to politicize it and to wrench it
into conformity with some dull but dangerous, ingenious but
ignorant, marketable but murderous Party Line as environmentalist
International Socialism does today.
Some 250 million
people have been killed by totalitarian regimes of the extreme Left
- the Communists, the Nazis and the Fascists - over the century
since the dismal October Revolution of 1917.
You will understand,
therefore, that I disagree with your apparent attempt to assert that
President Trump is a fascist:
for his supporters would no doubt
argue that he has spoken and acted for those working people whom the
totalitarian "Democrats", with their pointlessly costly regime of
taxes, charges and regulations intended to destroy the coal, oil and
gas industries and the many other industries depending on them, had
wantonly abandoned.
And it should never be forgotten that modern
environmentalist socialism was invented by Hitler in
Mein Kampf as a method of
exercising that fingertip control over every aspect of people's
lives and work that all totalitarians crave.
Such questions,
however, are more political than scientific.
Beyond saying that
science tends to be corrupted by cruel notions such as eugenicism or
Lysenkoism under totalitarian regimes, and to prosper in a climate
of freedom, I respectfully decline to address your question. I do
not do politics, as the environmentalist socialists do. I do
science.
As Lucretius put it,
Felix
qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
- happy is he who finds the
why of things.
Science is my be-all and end-all.
Envoi
Canlorbe: Thank you
for your time. Is there anything you would like to add?
Dr. Soon:
I wish to thank you for your excellent questions.
You have given me
the opportunity to pause and reflect on concepts I have not
contemplated in quite some time. I have simply shared my humble but
sincere premise that the search for the truth in science must
prevail.
No religious, social, political or philosophical
convictions must be allowed to confuse, corrupt or deny the inherent
beauty and purity and truth that subsist in the scientific method to
which I have devoted and shall ever devote my life.
