Inherit my wind

The country’s state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition said it had lodged papers with the High Court asking the court to invalidate the official temperatures record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The lobby of climate sceptics and Act Party have long criticised Niwa over its temperature data, which Niwa says is mainstream science and not controversial, and the raw data publicly available.

Niwa challenged over accuracy of data, New Zealand Herald. Monday 16th August 2010.

A large number of speakers at the conference were practical workers who sang the praises of Lysenko’s methods. The geneticists did not galvanise such ‘men of the people’ to defend their views. One speaker banged the point home: “Just try, if you can, to swing this tractor driver round to the position of bourgeois agrochemistry! No, he has already put his weighty tractor drivers hand into the scales of the old scientific controversy . . . and his word is decisive.” This was offered as a stronger argument than anything geneticists could come up with in the lab.
Another means of showing that the geneticists were pseudoscientific according to Soviet standards was to show the ‘unscientific’ tactics the geneticists used in defense of their work. The Lysenkoists accused them of monopolising biological research establishments, scientific publications and biology teaching, as well as refusing to engage in discussion, preventing the exploration of Michurin’s theory and arrogantly dismissing views that were not comparable with their own. When they recognised that perhaps they too were now intimidating their scientific opponents they absolved themselves of wrongdoing by claiming they did it with scientific truth on their side.

Ethan Pollack, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton University Press. 2006.