Eugenics and Global Warming. Both Settled Science. Both Wrong.

In his book, “The Vision of the Anointed,” Thomas Sowell writes that for so long as people have been free there has been an elite class of intellectuals – you know them – who have felt anointed to order the lives of the rest of us.

Their desire to decide on our behalf is less a generous offer of assistance than a belief that we are just not up to the task of deciding for ourselves. And their opinion of us as a people is less than generous also.

Rousseau likened the masses of the people to “a stupid pusillanimous invalid.” William Godwin said the peasant had “the contemptible insensitivity of an oyster.”

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At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th the intellectual consensus was that eugenics was “settled science.”

It was believed that "the best" human beings were not having as many children as inferior ones. Those considered inferior were foreigners, immigrants, Jews, Blacks, degenerates, the unfit and the "feeble minded." The solution was for government to control reproduction in order to improve the gene pool.

The most respected scientists from the Ivy League and other bastions of intellectual rigor retreated to Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Their support came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman fortune working with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and other agencies.

The theory won approval of presidents, Supreme Court justices and Nobel Prize winners. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was one of the most vocal adherents. She established the first "birth control" clinic in 1916.

Sanger spoke of the burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste."

H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Teddy Roosevelt said, "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

In due course the intellectual center of gravity of the eugenics movement migrated from Cold Spring Harbor to the German Reich and Hitler carried eugenics to its logical conclusion.

An embarrassed intellectual class soon pretended that they had never heard of eugenics and over time it disappeared from the college curriculum.

The “settled science” around which the elites have rallied today is global warming.

The solution to global warming, of course, is similar to their solution for most of the problems they see. First, we must raise taxes. Second, we must give the government more power.

As was the case with eugenics, global warmists attract huge sums of money from governments for research that reinforces the preordained position.

Fortunately, as was the case with eugenics, not all scientists fall for the most recent politically popular position and frank scientific discovery is raising serious questions about the scientific fad that is global warming.

There has been no warming in the past 18 years and 10 months.

Sea level increases have slowed to an almost imperceptible rise.

And, importantly, global sea surface temperatures are falling sharply suggesting a global cooling rather than warming.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy has tempered her position. She told Congress that the brutal regulatory regime that has destroyed the coal industry is meant to show “leadership” rather than slow global warming.

That, however, will not slow scientists for whom real money is at stake. Twenty global warming scientists have written to President Barack Obama asking him to prosecute, under the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, those who “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.”

In an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked whether the Department of Justice had considered legal action against “climate deniers.”

“This matter has been discussed.” Lynch said. “We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI

Al Gore met with a group of Democrat State Attorneys General and discussed using legal action to penalize dissenters.

“Financial damages alone may be insufficient,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said during the event. “The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

It is poetic justice that Obama’s Science Czar, John Holdren, has a record in both the eugenics and global warming camps.

In 1977 Holdren co-authored a book supporting forced sterilization to save the planet. Today he is warning us that farmers and construction workers will die from global warming.

It does appear that the tent that houses the circus that is the most recent scientific fad is coming down.

And none too soon. It appears to be ending before they could sterilize the deniers.

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