One of the world’s most respected scholars is Thomas Sowell. Sowell is an American author social commentator and economist. He became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative with widely published commentary and books.
In an interview done on the 11th of December 2009 courtesy of the Hoover Institution Peter Robinson asked a series of questions to Sowell of which I am producing four.
1.”Again intellectuals and society. There is a spontaneous demand from the larger society for the end products of engineering medical and scientific professions but the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by the public intellectuals themselves. Explain that. How do they manufacture demand for their own services?”
“Yes. One thing is by making alarming predictions; offering solutions to our problemsand they didn’t do that. If Noam Chomsky had just kept on stating in linguistics the universe probably have never heard of Noam Chomsky. He would have been just as famous around the world among linguists but nobody else would have heard of him.”
2. “What do you make of global warming?”
“I think it’s a classic example of for the need for Crusades. Now maybe many people are shocked by these emails. I’m at all shocked by them. I read the original UN study years ago and I was just curious as to how they were going to deal with the question that the temperatures went up first and then there was the increase in carbon dioxide. Because you can’t say that A causes B if B happened first.And so I read this and I could see that they were tiptoeing through the two loops and the way they phrased things and so forth they couldn’t confront that. And now we’re finding out that they knew well that they couldn’t deal with all the evidence.”
3. “So it fits the pattern of a group of intellectuals science climate scientists who have a very narrow competency suddenly proclaiming that there’s a crisis scaring the rest of us thereby creating a demand for their services not as science climate scientists alone but as a kind of high priestly caste that can tell us all how to live and save the entire planet and in the meantime generate billion of dollars worth of government progams to fund their research initiatives. So it’s a racket!”
“Yes but again you have to take account of the ability of human beings to rationalize. I am sure there are scientists out there who believe that much of what they’re saying and there are scientists out there who believe the opposite. But the ones who are pushing global warming are making their damnedest to make sure that those who believe the opposite don’t get heard in the public.”
4.”So shouldn’t there be some largish body of climate scientists who say ‘The data really does suggest that we’re headed into trouble here. But precisely because my saying so as a climate scientist will look like special pleading we as a community of scientists should be even more careful about being completely transparent pushing the data out to the public. They should overcome the hurdle that looks like self-pleading. Why isn’t that taking place?”
“There’s no pay off to that. Imagine yourself as an assistant professor in some department where your senior colleagues are going to vote on your pay among other things. I have millions of dollars in grants handed out to promote global warming and you say what you’ve just now said. And they will say that this guy is just incorrigible.”