CORRUPTING SCIENCE

Have you ever heard of the Milankovitch Climate Theory?  You should have. 
Milutin Milankovitch was a Serbian astrophysicist and mathematician, born in 1879, who became fascinated with discoveries about the Ice Ages, and determined to find what caused them.  First he studied variations in the cycles of Earth’s orbit and noted how seasonal and latitudinal variations in solar radiation hit the Earth at different times and in different ways.  Then, working without the aid of any computer, he calculated back over 600,000 years to analyze the rise and fall of global temperatures, particularly in the northern latitudes where the great glacier sheets began.  He came up with an astrological theory which thoroughly explained the advance and retreat of Ice Ages.
He concluded that Earth’s orbit varies in three cycles of reliable, but different, lengths.  The shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun varies from more to less elliptical in cycles of about 96,000 years.  Then there’s axial tilt;  this tilt changes from 21.5 to 24.5 degrees and back again every 41,000 years.  Third, Earth’s axis of spin wobbles in a cycle of 23,000 years.  When the three cycles coincide with each other, they can produce a difference of 20% in the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface in the northern latitudes.  In 1941 he published “The Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem” which laid out his climate theory. 
Milankovitch died in 1958.  Since then, advanced techniques in paleontology showed that the Ice Ages did, in fact, follow his analyses.  In 1976 the journal Scinece published confirmation of Milankovitch’s theory and showed that it corresponded accurately to various cooling and warming periods in Earth’s history.  In 1982 the National Research Council of the US National Academy of Sciences adopted Milankovitch’s theory as solid truth.  Then, in 2000, NASA published information on its Earth Observatory website, cautiously confirming the Milankovitch Climate Theory, and showing that Earth’s climate depends far more on external factors than any human activity.  If anything, human deforestation of the planet, over the last 5000 years, has had far more to do with the climate than carbon dioxide – or methane or water vapor -- added to the atmosphere. 
In fact, all those three gasses occur naturally, and have limitations imposed by nature.  Water vapor condenses into rain and falls where the winds drive it.  Methane is created by decomposition of organic materials, and is burned by lightning – which strikes 200 times per second in Earth’s atmosphere -- into water and carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide is promptly inhaled by plants, and encourages their growth.  If excess CO2 is worrisome, the obvious answer is to plant more plants: preferably big and long-lived ones, like trees, especially fruit and nut trees, which produce food.  Any biologist could tell you this.
What particularly worries me is not just that the biologists haven’t been speaking out on the cure for “global warming” but that NASA knew – almost 20 years ago – about the true cause of “climate change”, and kept the knowledge quiet.  Why?  What did NASA, or the country’s biologists for that matter, have to gain by allowing the global-warming/climate-change panic to reach such ridiculous proportions?  What did these scientists have to gain by letting politicians rant about “carbon taxes”, subsidizing electric cars, banning plastic or pushing vegetarianism?  One can guess at the old standby carrot-and-stick of research grants offered or reputations spoiled, but why did so many fall prey to it?  Has the scientific community become so thoroughly dependent on the good will of politicians that it let’s itself be this thoroughly corrupted?
And by the way, the cure to the plastic-garbage problem is depolymerization – reducing the plastic back to crude oil – for which there are several patented processes.  Go look them up.
--Leslie <;)))><