PAGE 3 — HISTORICAL ANALOGIES AND QUOTES
HISTORICAL ANALOGIES AND QUOTES Lessons From Past “Scientific Certainties”
History is full of moments when experts insisted the debate was over, the science was settled, and dissenters were dangerous or ignorant. Many of those moments ended in embarrassment, disaster, or both.
This page highlights historical episodes where consensus thinking failed — not to mock the past, but to remind us that certainty is often a political posture, not a scientific one.
EXAMPLES OF FAILED CONSENSUS
Dietary Fat and Heart Disease For decades, the public was told that fat was the enemy. The consensus was enforced by government policy, media pressure, and selective science. It was wrong.
Eugenics Once endorsed by scientists, universities, and governments. It was presented as settled science. It was morally and scientifically bankrupt.
Population Bomb Predictions Experts warned of mass starvation and societal collapse by the 1980s. None of it happened.
Ulcers and Stress Doctors insisted ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle. Two scientists who proposed a bacterial cause were mocked — until they were proven right.
Continental Drift Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for suggesting continents move. Today, plate tectonics is foundational science.
COVID-19 Scientific Shifts Guidance changed repeatedly, often presented as absolute truth one month and quietly reversed the next.
WHY THESE EXAMPLES MATTER Not because climate science is identical to these cases. Not because past mistakes automatically invalidate current claims. But because they show a pattern: When science becomes intertwined with politics, funding, and ideology, dissent is treated as heresy rather than inquiry.
WHAT THIS PAGE PROVIDES
Historical summaries of major scientific reversals
Quotes from scientists, policymakers, and critics
Examples of how consensus was enforced
Parallels to modern climate discourse
Predictions from the 1970’s, era of the first Earth Day
The Semmelweis reflex or “Semmelweis effect” is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.[1]
The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly, after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased patient.) Semmelweis’s procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed “cadaverous particles”, twenty years before germ theory was discovered.[2] Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence, his fellow doctors rejected his hand-washing suggestions, often for non-medical reasons. For instance, some doctors refused to believe that a gentleman’s hands could transmit disease.[3]
In the preface to the fiftieth anniversary edition of his book The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas Szasz says that Semmelweis’s biography impressed upon him at a young age, a “deep sense of the invincible social power of false truths.”[5]
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“The warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past fifty years,” Koonin writes, according to the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report.
· “Since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of significant tornadoes hasn’t changed much at all, but the strongest storms have become less frequent,” according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data (NOAA).
· “The rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today,” according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
· Instead of droughts, “the past fifty years have been slightly wetter than average” in the United States, according to NOAA figures.
· Rather than famine, “in the fifty years from 1961 to 2011, global yields of wheat, rice, and maize … each more than doubled,” according to the IPCC.
· “The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”
It would be helpful if the media covered all sides of the climate issue.
September 2021
The UN Admits That The Paris Climate Deal Was A Fraud
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/the-un-admits-that-the-paris-climate-deal-was-a-fraud/investors.com
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“The inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon – it’s about capitalism. … we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better [socialism, of course].” – Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.
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Predictions from the 1970’s, era of the first Earth Day
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”— Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
“[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
History warns us that certainty is often a mask. Real science welcomes questions. Real science tolerates dissent. Real science evolves.
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