A RUSSIAN LOOMED over the House of Representatives Wednesday. And it wasn’t Putin. Instead, the figure who came up in two different discussions among House members was
Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist who manipulated data in ways that fit perfectly with the political agenda of Joseph Stalin.
Lysenko’s theories, which rejected the now accepted ideas of genes and genetic inheritance, were so appealing to the Soviet dictator they became the only ones taught in the country in the 1940s as Soviet scientists were forbidden from contradicting his teachings. Yet the actual research behind Lysenko’s conclusions was so off base that the decision to exempt him from the standard scientific process ultimately helped lead to a famine.
The story of the man who imperiled his country with pseudoscience designed to please a politician seemed particularly relevant during a day filled with Republican efforts to provide scientific cover for a range of unscientific policies.
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology began the day with a
hearing called Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method. Held just two days after a Trump https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/28/presidential-executive-order-promoting-energy-independence-and-economi-1 killed
federal efforts to address climate change, the hearing included testimony from three experts far out of the scientific mainstream whose careers have been boosted by promoting theories that benefit Republicans and the fossil fuel industry.
Expert witnesses Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke Jr., who are frequently called on to present the Republican case for inaction on climate in Congress, all underscored the point that whatever is happening with the climate has been exaggerated and doesn’t warrant serious action, a message that may be particularly welcome to administration officials who have already decided to take just that path.
The focus on the convenient untruths of Curry, Pielke, and Christy was an after-the-fact attempt to justify the about-face by turning scientific reality on its head. Although https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate warming trends are “extremely likely due to human activity,” only one of four witnesses represented that point of view.
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Before the day was done, the House was involved in yet another effort to swap out independent environmental science with something more to industry’s liking. The EPA Science Advisory Bill Reform Act, which was introduced on Tuesday night and was passed by the House this morning, would limit the number of independent scientists who can serve on that body and allow people who have financial ties to the matters being discussed to serve on the board as long as they disclose their conflicts of interest.
The proposal got Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly thinking once again about Lysenko in Soviet Russia: “The last time a great power decided to deny science-based policy and to actually dictate politically what was science and what wasn’t was Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Famous scientist named Lysenko, who turned out to be a fraud and a con artist. But for 30 years, his thinking dominated Soviet science.” That folly led to millions of deaths, said Connolly, who predicted that the U.S. government’s departure from established science would not end well.