This list is written with the intention of being a living document, which means it will be updated as more examples of leftwing science are added, and whenever new and pertinent evidence is discovered.

So bookmark this page.

Although assigning a date to many of these myths is difficult, the list is roughly in chronological order to give readers a feeling for the damage done by this particular form of leftwing dishonesty over the years—damage to both human welfare and the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Part 1 was about how and why the left twists science, and Part 2 went into detail about Darwinism which Ann Coulter calls the “creation myth of the church of liberalism.â€�  Now it’s time for the promised list:

Evolution/Darwinism—1859
Peak oil—1914
DDT—1962
Ralph Nader and the Chevrolet Corvair—1965
Overpopulation—1968
Endangered Species Act—1973
55 MPH speed limit—1974
Ozone layer—1978
Global warming—1988
Alar—1989
Secondhand smoke—1993
Partial-birth abortion—1996

Evolution/Darwinism—1859

Dealt with extensively in Part 1, Darwinism is the foundation of liberal/atheist cosmology and therefore protected fiercely by the left from any kind of intellectual challenge.  In over a century and a half, no examples of evolution have been found that didn’t eventually turn out to be simple adaptations or, worse, outright scams perpetrated by Darwinist scientists.  Examples of scams—some of them still taught in textbooks—include Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Orce Man, Flipperpithecus, Archaeoraptor, peppered moths in England, and Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings which purported to show the similarity of different species in early stages of development.  (No, human embryos do not look like fish at any point, in spite of what you learned in school.)  Currently, embarrassed Darwinists are relegated to touting bacteria as examples of evolution but even so they find proof elusive because, when it comes to single-celled organisms, the definition of what constitutes a new species is highly debatable—and those doggone bacteria have a habit of turning back into their original selves the moment the Darwinists turn their backs and start bellowing about a new species.

Peak oil—1914

Since 1914 they’ve been predicting that we will run out of oil any minute.  This is a handy prediction for justifying government rationing schemes and centralized power over people’s energy usage.  In 1914 U.S. government scientists predicted that we would run out of oil by 1924.  In 1930 they predicted we would run out by 1951.  In 1951 the prediction was updated to 1964.  In 1977 President Jimmy Carter gave a nationally televised speech announcing that we would run out of oil by 1989.  Those are just examples—the pessimistic predictions are an annual event.  During all of this time, in spite of those predictions, the estimated reserves of recoverable hydrocarbons in the ground continued to increase, both in the U.S. and worldwide.  Today known reserves are so astronomical that it’s hard to imagine a time when the world will run out, yet the notion of “peak oilâ€� persists.  Peak oil is a theory that at some point rapidly diminishing amounts of oil in the ground will cause oil production to plummet and energy prices to skyrocket.  Yet at the moment, 2011, the U.S. alone has enough oil, coal, and natural gas to last for centuries even at ever-increasing usage rates.  The only problem is getting the lefties out of the way so we can use it.

DDT—1962

1962 is the year Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published indicting DDT as the cause for many environmental problems and suggesting it was carcinogenic and a health hazard.  None of that was true and no scientific evidence was presented in the book to back up those claims.  To be fair to Rachel Carson, she never advocated the ban of DDT but only a reduced use of it, but irrational left wingers took the ball she gave them and ran with it to LaLaLand.  Rachel Carson’s book is the inspiration for two giant federal agencies which bedevil us daily: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Fish and Wildlife Service (where Rachel Carson plays a role similar to the role the Virgin Mary plays in the Catholic Church).  DDT, after decades of study, turns out to be the most effective insecticide ever invented and the safest.  Stories abound of chemical company representatives eating spoonfuls of DDT to prove how safe it is, and no scientific study has ever linked DDT to cancer in humans.  In 1972, the newly created EPA’s first director, William Ruckelshaus, in a purely political decision, banned DDT in the U.S. after seven months of scientific hearings that found no credible evidence of DDT being a hazard to either human health or wildlife.  Over the next few decades left wingers spread that ban around the world.  What we have now is a nearly-worldwide ban on DDT initiated in the United States, which hypocritically used DDT to eliminate malaria within its own borders before banning it.  Meanwhile, in much of the third world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the scourge of malaria is rampant.  A child dies from malaria every 30 seconds and sites like this one keep a running tally of the human deaths caused by the DDT ban.  The number of deaths stands at more than one hundred five million, arguably making William Ruckelshaus the worst mass murderer in human history.  Ponder that while scratching your bedbug bites.

Ralph Nader and the Chevrolet Corvair—1965

In 1965, Ralph Nader published a book titled Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, the first chapter of which was called, “The Sporty Corvair—The One-Car Accident.â€�  Nader outright lied in that chapter according to a 1969 article in Sports Car Graphic.  The Corvair was a car ahead of its time and, while it might seem to have shortcomings by today’s standards, as a rear-engine compact vehicle with good mileage it was perfectly positioned for the coming OPEC oil shortages which arrived a few years later.  Unfortunately, Nader’s dishonest book killed the car and, instead of an American company being positioned to take advantage of higher gas prices, the Volkswagen Beetle grabbed all those sales and then the Japanese.  In 1971, three years after its demise, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ran extensive tests on the Corvair and found that “the 1960–63 Corvair compares favorably with contemporary vehicles used in the tests... the handling and stability performance of the 1960–63 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover, and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic.â€�  In other words, Nader made himself famous and inflicted his asinine presidential campaigns on us by lying and doing irreparable harm to the American car industry, which remains gun-shy about small cars to this day.

Overpopulation—1968

This one could be dated 1798, the year that Thomas Malthus started publishing An Essay on the Principle of Population, which postulated that population growth would eventually preclude human progress.  This notion was proven spectacularly wrong, with human progress since that time creating dramatic advancement in both knowledge and living conditions even as the world’s population has grown to approximately 7 billion, almost nine times the 1798 population.  But in spite of its obvious wrongness, the left refuses to abandon the Malthusian worldview and in 1968 a scientist named Paul Ehrlich published an idiotic book called The Population Bomb which predicted, among other things, unavoidable mass starvation of humanity in the 1970s (amended to “1970s and 80sâ€� in editions published in the 1970s), a substantial increase in human death rates (rates continue a steady decline), and that India could not possibly be self-sufficient in food by 1971 (a prediction which was removed from the 1971 and later editions when India’s food situation awkwardly improved).  As if events didn’t already show him up as an ass and a fool, Ehrlich doubled down in 1980 by joining with colleague John Holdren to make a bet with Julian Simon that the book’s predicted “age of scarcityâ€� would cause commodity prices to rise over the next ten years.  That didn’t happen either and they were forced to mail Simon a check in 1990.  Nothing better illustrates the enduring faith that liberals have in their science myths than the overpopulation-as-catastrophe Malthusian viewpoint of humanity.  They love it because it considers human beings, created in God’s image, to be parasites rather than assets.  To this day, Paul Ehrlich remains an honored member of the science faculty at Stanford University and is an annual invitee to the Earth Day celebrations inspired by his book.  And that colleague who joined with Ehrlich to make The Bet?  John Holdren?  Barack Obama thought so highly of him he made the guy his White House Science Czar.  You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Endangered Species Act—1973

Ever since this act was passed, liberal environmental whackos have used it as a weapon to impede progress and the economic health of the nation.  Originally written to allow common sense consideration of costs and benefits, the act was amended in 1982 to preclude consideration of economic factors.  The leftwing was rapturous—it’s the 1982 amendment they point to when they toast their victory.  In addition to the 1982 amendment, biologists working for the Fish and Wildlife Service have gradually expanded the definition of “speciesâ€� to a vague subjective standard that includes whatever critter they want.  There are hundreds of thousands of desert tortoises crawling around the American west, for example, but by dividing them into multiple “sub-populationsâ€� or “sub-speciesâ€� they can justify spending tens of millions of dollars protecting the “endangeredâ€� desert tortoise from extinction—while abrogating and extinguishing private property rights everywhere and anywhere, and preventing use of public land for anything productive.  Meanwhile, in spite of the shrill warnings about mass extinction of wildlife on Planet Earth, the list of known species gets longer every year and a recent report discovered that one third of all species declared extinct by biologists end up being found alive and well somewhere.  Oops.

55 mph national speed limit—1974

In 1973, Middle Eastern oil producers proclaimed an oil embargo to protest U.S. support for Israel, creating a sharp spike in oil prices and shortages of gasoline.  One of the responses by the U.S. was to pass the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act in 1974, which prohibited speed limits higher than 55 miles-per-hour.  The idea was to make Americans drive slower and thereby use less gasoline.  Subsequent studies found the law wildly ineffective and thoroughly despised by drivers but the real argument began when rational people tried to repeal it.  Suddenly, liberals began insisting that lower speed limits save lives and that’s been their story ever since, no matter how much proof is supplied showing that 55 mph speed limits did not save lives.  With the left it’s always about their lust for control.  “Didn’t save gas?  Okay, but it saved lives.  Didn’t save lives either?  Well, don’t worry, we’ll think of another excuse to slow you down.  Just give us time.â€�

Ozone layer—1978

In 1978 the United States, Canada, and Norway agreed to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosol sprays because a few scientists were worried that CFCs reacted with the ozone layer around the planet and might eliminate it.  Mind you, they had no hard evidence that any such thing was happening but that didn’t stop them from foaming at the mouth about it.  Then in 1985 somebody noticed there was a hole in the ozone layer around the Antarctic and the leftwing went apeshit.  Finally, Chicken Little was right!  The sky really was falling!  By 1996 the world was stitched tightly into treaties which eliminated CFC production and use, and our refrigerators and air conditioners haven’t worked right since.  Further research yielded a lot of pertinent information.  Yes, CFCs react with ozone but the ozone layer is a balanced situation wherein the less there is, the more the atmosphere produces and, since the factory for the ozone comprises the entire atmospheric blanket of the planet, it’s physically impossible to eliminate the ozone layer.  The hole over the Antarctic?  It’s caused by a magnetic issue, not a shortage of ozone.  So, has the left gracefully backed down and allowed CFCs back into our refrigerators?  Of course not.

Global warming—1988

We know all about this one.  JPAttitude has a whole page dedicated to it.  The Global Warming scam started in 1988 with congressional testimony from James “The Muzzledâ€� Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, on climate change.  Basically, Hansen predicted that Earth was doomed because humans were creating too much carbon dioxide, turning the atmosphere into a greenhouse, thereby warming the climate.  To make his testimony more dramatic, Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, opened the windows of the hearing room ahead of time, during a summer heat wave, so the senators would be sweating while they listened.  That’s a pretty good analogy for leftwing science in general: theatrics instead of facts, designed to fool the masses into accepting leftist solutions for problems that don’t actually exist.

Alar—1989

Alar is a plant growth regulator which was sprayed on fruit to regulate growth, make harvesting easier, and enhance color.  In the 1980s, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) hired a public relations firm, Fenton Communications, and formulated a highly-organized campaign to put themselves on the map (and increase fund raising) by scaring the hell out of American mothers.  Their first move was a strategically-placed, highly-inflammatory, mostly-inaccurate report on 60 Minutes which suggested that Alar on apples was poisoning children.  Mothers across the land ended up pouring apple juice down the drain and taking apples off their children’s menus.  Since then, as studies have been performed and facts have accumulated, we’ve learned that the original information from the NRDC and 60 Minutes came from studies which poured so much Alar into rats and mice that a child would have to drink 5,000 gallons of apple juice a day to get an equivalent amount.  At that rate, the rats and mice were probably dying from simple poisoning.  Even water will kill you at those amounts.  Nevertheless, in 1989 the EPA decided to ban Alar because “long-term exposure posed unacceptable risks to public health,â€� a nice vague statement that says nothing concrete but assures unending fame for the NRDC, an organization who nobody ever heard of before they manufactured the apple-juice panic.

Secondhand smoke—1993

In 1993 the EPA (have you noticed how many of these leftwing science scams involve the EPA?) released a report, “Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders,â€� which concluded that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer in adult nonsmokers and impairs the respiratory health of children.  Surely they had some concrete evidence, right?  Well, think about it: did they have concrete evidence when they banned DDT or CFCs or Alar?  Turns out there is no evidence of any sort that implicates secondhand smoke as a health hazard.  Not in adults, and not in children.  In fact, the largest study of secondhand smoke ever attempted, a study of over 118,000 Californians from 1968 to 1998, concluded that “…results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality…â€�  But the EPA’s indictment of secondhand smoke is one of the left’s biggest coups ever because it gives them an excuse to regulate private behavior in public places, and even step into private homes and tell people what they can do around their kids.  So don’t expect them to ever admit they’re wrong, no matter what.

Medical necessity for partial-birth abortion—1996

In 1995, when congress was hotly debating the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the left tried to invent two facts: one, that anesthesia given to the mother prevented any pain to the baby; and two, that partial-birth abortions are sometimes medically necessary.  Both are untrue.  In little-noticed testimony in 1996, the heads of two major professional societies of anesthesiologists emphatically refuted the notion that the babies feel no pain during the procedure.  Then, also in 1996, to give Bill Clinton ammunition to justify vetoing the act, his associate White House counsel, Elena Kagan, altered a statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which stated there were no circumstances under which partial birth abortion would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.  After Kagan’s alteration, the statement said exactly the opposite.  She added the words, “An intact D&X, however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.â€�  Based on those words, written by Kagan, a lawyer working for Bill Clinton, not a doctor, the Supreme Court overturned Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban in 2000 and the myth that partial-birth abortion is a medically-necessary procedure is touted by liberals to this day.  Elena Kagan, as reward for her lying, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in 2010.

~~~~~

If you wonder how the left can maintain so many science fallacies, look no further than the support they get from the mainstream media.  Even science magazines have been commandeered by leftists.  Discover Magazine, which I used to love, has veered so far left into ideological territory I can barely stomach reading it.  In June of 2009, Scientific American published a list of people receiving the magazine’s annual Honor Roll awards and I was so flabbergasted I saved the issue as inspiration for this website.  Here are five of the ten “scienceâ€� awards for 2009:

Page 62: Todd Brady, who helped Intel gain a reputation for environmentalism.  (Is that science?)

Page 63: Shai Agassi, for assembling a battery recharge infrastructure in California.  (Again, is that science?)

Page 64: Eugenie Scott, who fights efforts to question Darwinism in public schools.  (By suing school districts.  Just what we need in science—censorship—right?)

Page 65: Bill Gates & Michael Bloomberg, who pledged $375 million for a world-wide anti-smoking campaign.  (Hey you, starving Somali, Bill and Mike want you to quit smoking so you don’t get cancer.)

Page 67: Barack Obama, for putting science at the center of policy-making.  (It just makes you want to throw up, doesn’t it?  Barack Obama is not a scientist!  Sheesh.)

It’s like a Who’s Who of leftwing birdbrains.  Hard to imagine how anybody could trust Scientific American to give them honest science stories after they’ve revealed themselves as leftwing shills.

Ironically, sharing page 67 with Obama was the 10th and last honoree, Andras Nagy, who discovered a practical way to coax skin cells into becoming stem cells, a direct and poignant indictment of Obama’s decision to expand research into embryonic stem cells three months earlier.  Apparently, the Scientific American editors are so out of touch with actual science that the irony flew over their heads.


From Reno, Nevada, USA