by Ann Coulter
In Omaha, the coldest month was February 1936, and its second-coldest month was December 1983. January 1998 was Denver’s fifth-driest on record. And in January 2004, Boston had its coldest month in seventy years. In fact, maybe what we’re seeing now is the beginning of the new ice age that some of these same scientists were predicting back in the 1970s. The law of large numbers means that someplace will always be having its hottest, coldest, wettest, or driest month.
Environmentalists claim this statistical inevitability proves global warming. As Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace explained, “Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” No set of facts can disprove the environmentalists’ secular religion. In 2004, former vice president Al Gore gave a speech on global warming in New York City on the coldest day of the year. Warm trends prove global warming.
Cold trends also prove global warming. This is the philosophy of a madman.
In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a computer model purportedly proving “a discernible human influence on global climate.” So according to the UN, there was not enough evidence to determine if Saddam Hussein was a threat, but the evidence is in on global warming. The key to the UN’s global warming study was man’s use of aerosol spray. You have to know the French were involved in a study concluding that Arrid Extra Dry is destroying the Earth. In the big picture, which would be a bigger threat to the global ecosystem: encroaching oceans flooding the world’s coastal cities, or the rest of the world adopting French deodorant habits?
According to global warming hysterics, global warming would begin at the poles and melt the ice caps, and then the oceans would rise. On the basis of such fatuous theories, in August 1998 the host of NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow, told his listeners to look out their windows and imagine the ocean in their own backyards. Explaining that receding glaciers in Antarctica would dramatically lift sea levels, he warned that their grandchildren could be “hanging fishing poles out of New York skyscrapers,” thus qualifying as the teller of the world’s all-time greatest “fish story.” On the plus side, maybe I could get a decent price for my place in Manhattan if I could list it as “steps from the beach.”
Since then, evidence disproving “global warming” has been pouring in. In January 2002, the journal Science published the findings of scientists who had been measuring the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Far from melting, it turned out the Ice Sheet was growing thicker. The researchers were Ian R. Joughin, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Taking the contrary view were distinguished research scientists Alicia Silverstone and Woody Harrelson.
About the same time, the journal Nature published the findings of scientist Peter Doran and his colleagues at the University of Illinois. Rather than using the UN’s “computer models,” the researchers took actual temperature readings. It turned out temperatures in the Antarctic have been getting slightly colder—not warmer—for the last thirty years. The chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, Michael Oppenheimer, responded to the new findings by urging caution and warning that “there is simply not enough data to make a broad statement about all of Antarctica.” That’s interesting. Global warming devotees don’t shy away from making broad statements about the temperature of the entire Planet Earth. We also didn’t have to wait for more data when lunatics curtailed the use of nuclear energy in this country. The movie The China Syndrome was hard scientific evidence.
We didn’t wait for more data when DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was banned on the basis of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring.
DDT was a miracle invention: tiny amounts of the chemical kill disease-carrying insects with no harm to humans, protecting them from malaria, dengue, and typhus.
American soldiers in World War II were bathed in DDT. Jews rescued from Nazi death camps were doused in it. During the debate on DDT prompted by Rachel Carson’s book, J. Gordon Edwards, mountain climber, park ranger, author, and professor of biology at San Jose State University, would eat spoonfuls of DDT at lectures to prove its safety to humans. Edwards lived a long and healthy life, finally dying in 2005 at the age of eighty-four while hiking. But children in America were indoctrinated with the idea that DDT would kill all the birds, and that made them sad. So in 1972, American environmentalists working through the EPA banned one of the greatest inventions in modern history.
Millions upon millions of people in Africa had to die on the basis of a book by a woman dying of cancer who was obsessed with the idea that it was caused by modern chemicals.
Continuing its tradition of helping the poor and enslaved, in 1986 the State Department informed African nations that the United States would no longer provide aid to countries using DDT. Last year, 80,000 people in Uganda alone died of malaria, half of them children. So environmentalists are again in a panic that African nations will use DDT to save millions of lives each year. The United States and Europe have threatened to ban Ugandan imports if they use DDT to stop this scourge. Environmentalists would prefer that millions of Africans die so that white liberals may continue gazing upon rare birds. Liberals don’t care about the environment. They want humans to die—or at least to smell like they have by abandoning their infernal deodorant use.
Tellingly, liberals’ one example of The Republican War on Science, as one book title puts it, is the Christian objection to Nazi experimentation on human embryos. As with other “sciences” admired by liberals, their enthusiasm for embryonic stem-cell research is based on lies. Liberals lie about the science on stem-cell research because they warm to the idea of destroying human embryos. If they can desensitize Americans to the idea of harvesting human embryos for imaginary medical cures, liberals believe it will help advance the cause of killing the unborn. As columnist Anna Quindlen said, the “pro-choicers” were always “at a loss” when faced with moral arguments in defense of an unborn baby. But with embryonic stem-cell research, Quindlen said, the “battle of personification will assume a different and more sympathetic visage in the years to come”—taking the form of Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve, Ronald Reagan, and other beloved public figures for whom embryonic stem-cell researchers can promise miracle cures they are not close to producing.$’
Although there has been research on both adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells since the fifties, only adult stem-cell research has produced any cures—and lots of ‘em.
Adult stem cells have been used for decades to treat dozens of diseases, including Type 1 diabetes, liver disease, and spinal cord injuries. Currently, adult stem cells are used to treat more than eighty different diseases.
Harvard medical researcher Denise Faustman has used adult stem cells to cure diabetes in mice. Other cures from adult stem cells are being tested in hundreds of clinical trials. Adult stem-cell researchers in Switzerland take a few strands of hair from burn victims and use the follicular stem cells on the tips to create entire disks of new skin, a vast improvement on ugly skin grafts. Recently, patients with damaged livers have been helped by injections of bone marrow adult stem cells collected not directly from their marrow (an extremely painful procedure) but simply cultivated from their blood.
By contrast, the embryonic stem-cell researchers have produced nothing. They have treated nothing. They have not even begun one human clinical trial. They’ve successfully treated a few rodents, but they keep running into two problems: First, the cells tend to be rejected by the immune system. Second, they tend to cause malignancies called teratomas—meaning “monster tumors.”
The idea that embryonic stem cells are on the verge of curing anything is absurd. It’s possible embryonic stem-cell research could find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease someday only in the sense that it is possible that a biologist’s toenail clippings could be used to find a cure for Alzheimer’s someday. Liberals aren’t demanding that taxpayer money be used for research on toenail clippings: t
hat would not advance their governing principle, which is to always kill human life (unless the human life being killed is likely to fly a plane into American skyscrapers, in which case, it is wrong to kill it).
The only advantage embryonic stem cells once had over adult stem cells was their ability to transform into any type of cell. But fast-advancing research on adult stem cells has stripped away even that theoretical advantage. As of 2002, adult stem cells were being converted into all three types of cells the body produces during early embryonic development. And adult stem cells were already curing people!
Embryonic stem-cell researchers were in trouble. It was as if thirty years after the invention of electricity, they were still trying to get someone to fund their research on candles. Results tend to draw more research dollars than pie-in-the-sky claims to maybe, possibly someday find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, PMS, balding, and hemorrhoidal itch. No one is going to buy a drawing of a potential cure when somebody else is already selling the cure.
Embryonic stem-cell researchers had only one choice: Accuse anyone opposed to taxpayer funding of embryonic stem-cell research of being “anti-science.” As Michael Fumento says, it was the very success of adult stem-cell research compared with the abject failure of embryonic stem-cell research that led to the all-out PR campaign: “Savvy venture capitalists have poured their money into ASCs, leaving ESC researchers desperate to feed at the federal (or state) trough.”
While adult stem-cell researchers were in their labs quietly discovering cures, embryonic stem-cell researchers were mounting a massive public relations assault that not only promised cures for every known human malady but also viciously attacked adult stem-cell research as useless. This is perhaps not surprising, since—in contrast to researchers on adult stem cells—embryonic stem-cell researchers are virtually never doctors. They’re biologists. They don’t care about healing people, they just want to be paid to push petri dishes around the lab, cut up a living human embryo, and sell it for parts like a stolen Toyota at a chop shop.
It’s always the same thing with liberals. Time and again doctors are just minding their own business trying to cure people and liberal special interest groups swoop in and take all their money. The most valuable people in society are under constant attack from trial lawyers, biologists, and class-warfare Democrats.
Appropriately, the spokesman for liberal “science” was once again a rich white male Southern lawyer doing a passable impression of Miss Cleo. At an Iowa campaign stop during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Edwards promised, “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases… . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Long predicted, it had finally happened: the Democrats had put Elmer Gantry on their presidential ticket. If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards.
Extravagant promises of miraculous cures turned out to be an extremely effective argument with people who knew nothing about the science involved, such as actors. In a grim irony, Christopher Reeve died waiting for the miracle cure promised by embryonic stem-cell researchers about the same time a South Korean woman who had been paralyzed for nineteen years began to walk again with the help of a walker—thanks to an injection of umbilical cord stem cells into the injured part of her spine. Long before Reeve died, two paralyzed American women with spinal cord injuries, Laura Dominguez and Susan Fajt, were treated with adult stem cells in Portugal. Both regained feeling and movement. Dominguez regained most upper body movement and began to walk with braces.
At a debate in New York before Reeve died, the head of a biotechnology company actually put his hand over the mouth of Reeve’s debating partner to prevent Reeve from hearing about the stunning advances being made with adult stem-cell cures. Plan B was to plug up Reeve’s ears with his fingers while humming loudly. They’re all about the dignity of the disabled, these liberals. Until Michael Fumento wrote about Hwang Mi-soon, the South Korean woman who began to walk again thanks to adult stem cells, there was no mention of it in any document on Nexis.
At least the embryonic stem-cell researchers have a clear financial incentive to lie about adult stem-cell research. Liberals just want to kill humans. Everyone with a doddering ninety-year-old parent is suddenly gung-ho on experimenting on human embryos—or “blastocysts,” as they are affectionately known to the “scientific community.” The Worst Generation is so appalled at the idea of having to take care of Mom and Dad, they’re lashing out at embryos.
Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time. We don’t have to hear the ghastly arguments of mothers against their own children, the travails of girls being sent away to live with their aunt for a few months, or the stories of women carrying the babies of rapists—as if that’s happened more than twice in the last half century. This is just harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter. There’s a famous book about this practice. It’s called Brave New World.
Nobody ever heard of this incredibly important research on human embryos until ten minutes ago, yet everyone makes believe he’s known about the undiscovered bounty in human embryos forever, and talks about it with real moral indignation. This whole debate is a hoax designed to trick Americans into yielding ground on human experimentation.
What great advances are we to expect from experimentation on human embryos—as opposed to adult stem cells, which have already produced cures? Liberals don’t know. It’s just a theory. But they definitely need to start slaughtering the unborn. Why not have the government give me a lot of money so I can sit around and think. Who knows what I might come up with? I’m clever. It’s possible. Give money to Ann or condemn the world to disease and pestilence! It is simply asserted that scientists need to experiment on human embryos if they are ever going to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, and so on. Maybe. If it’s true, but no one has demonstrated that it is true. Liberals are sobbing and groaning that we don’t know if the Strategic Defense Initiative will work. We shot a missile out of the sky. What’s their proof?
Decades of research are called for in the case of human embryos. We don’t know if this will work or not, but just to be on the safe side we’d better start chopping up as many human embryos as we can get our hands on. Whereas global warming is a closed matter in need of no further study.
The last great advance for human experimentation in this country was the federal government’s acquiescence to the scientific community’s demands for money to experiment on aborted fetuses. Denouncing the “Christian right” for opposing the needs of science, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times claimed in February 2000 that the experiments were “crucial to potential cures for Parkinson’s disease.”
Almost exactly a year later, the Times ran a front-page story describing the results of those experiments on Parkinson’s patients: Not only was there no positive effect from injecting fetal brain tissue into the recipients, but about 15 percent of the patients had nightmarish side effects. The unfortunate patients “writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about.” In the words of one scientist, “They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend.” And the worst thing was, the scientists couldn’t turn it off”
But the science that is working—adult stem-cell research—gets attacked and lied about in order to elevate the science that has produced nothing. In the August 24, 2004, New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata claimed that no one had succeeded in using adult stem cells “to treat diseases.”
A short list of the successful treatments achieved by adult stem cells are these:
• Rebuilding livers wracked by otherwise irreversible cirrhosis
• Repairing spinal cord injuries by using stem cells from nasal and sinus regions
• Completely r
eversing Type 1 diabetes in mice using adult spleen cells
• Putting Crohn’s disease into remission with the patient’s own blood stem cells
• Putting lupus into remission using stem cells from the patient’s bloodstream
• Treating sickle-cell anemia using stem cells from umbilical cord blood
• Repairing the heart muscles in patients with congestive heart failure using adult stem cells from bone marrow
• Repairing heart attack damage with the patient’s own blood stem cells
• Restoring bone marrow in cancer patients using stem cells from umbilical cord blood
• Restoring weak heart muscles using immature skeletal muscle cells
• Putting leukemia into remission using umbilical cord blood
• Healing bone fractures with bone marrow cells
• Restoring sight in blind people using an ocular surface stem-cell transplant and a cornea transplant
• Treating urinary incontinence using stem cells from underarm muscle
• Reversing severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) with genetically modified adult stem cells
• Restoring blood circulation in legs with bone marrow stem cells
Meanwhile, embryonic stem cells have never cured anything in any living creature.
What’s so disarming about the Left’s pretend interest in “science” is that they have the audacity to shut down debate in the name of “science.” Science is the study of the world as it exists, which, to their constant annoyance, is not the world liberals would like it to be. Liberals are personally offended that the AIDS virus seems to discriminate against gays. So they lie about it. They are sad that IQ is not infinitely malleable but has a genetic component. So they lie about it (and denounce people who tell the truth as racists). They are angry that men and women have different innate abilities. So they lie about it (also cry and stamp their feet).