CCF Editor's Note: Occasionally we like to highlight an item from our vault that should be required reading for any person interested in how we got from rational, scientific thinking to the current hysterical pandering by politicians and environmentalists. This speech, while only a few years old, provides an excellent history "detailing how over the last thirty years scientists have begun to intermingle scientific and political claims."

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My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I wasborn in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at theheight of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under mydesk in preparation for a nuclear attack.

It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child Ibelieved that science represented the best and greatest hope formankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world ofpolitics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears,of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. Incontrast, science held different values-international in scope, forgingfriendships and working relationships across national boundaries andpolitical systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, andultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefitall mankind. The world might not be a very good place, but sciencewould make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largelyfulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectualadventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restlessworld.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed thehungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. Ialso expected science to banish the evils of human thought---prejudiceand superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expectedscience to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demonhaunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with the impact ofscience. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in someinstances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics andpublicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years areinvented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permittingthese demons to escape free.

But let's look at how it came to pass.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president,commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest universitymainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at thenew National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist namedFrank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search forextraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. Itturns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drakeorganizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famousDrake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is thefraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable ofsupporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fiis the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fractionthat communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life duringwhich the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as alegitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that noneof the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The onlyway to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-justso we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be"informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with lifechoose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informedguess. It's simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billionsand billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything meansnothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literallymeaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard viewthat science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drakeequation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI isunquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief insomething for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is theword of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created theuniverse in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there areother life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not asingle shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty yearsof searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely noevidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

One way to chart the cooling of enthusiasm is to review popularworks on the subject. In 1964, at the height of SETI enthusiasm, WalterSullivan of the NY Times wrote an exciting book about life in theuniverse entitled WE ARE NOT ALONE. By 1995, when Paul Davis wrote abook on the same subject, he titled it ARE WE ALONE? ( Since 1981,there have in fact been four books titled ARE WE ALONE.) More recentlywe have seen the rise of the so-called "Rare Earth" theory whichsuggests that we may, in fact, be all alone. Again, there is noevidence either way.

Back in the sixties, SETI had its critics, although not amongastrophysicists and astronomers. The biologists and paleontologistswere harshest. George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard sneered that SETI wasa "study without a subject," and it remains so to the present day.

But scientists in general have been indulgent toward SETI, viewingit either with bemused tolerance, or with indifference. After all,what's the big deal? It's kind of fun. If people want to look, letthem. Only a curmudgeon would speak harshly of SETI. It wasn't worththe bother.

And of course it is true that untestable theories may have heuristicvalue. Of course extraterrestrials are a good way to teach science tokids. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to see the Drakeequation clearly for what it is-pure speculation in quasi-scientifictrappings.

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams ofoutrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationistnew claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, aloosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientificprocedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze throughthe cracks.

Now let's jump ahead a decade to the 1970s, and Nuclear Winter.

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on "Long-TermWorldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations" but thereport estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to berelatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued areport on "The Effects of Nuclear War" and stated that nuclear warcould perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on theenvironment. However, because the scientific processes involved werepoorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimatethe probable magnitude of such damage.

Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciencescommissioned a report entitled "The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War:Twilight at Noon," which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke fromburning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would beso much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere wouldreduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis,and that this would last for weeks or even longer.

The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and CarlSagan published a paper in Science called "Nuclear Winter: GlobalConsequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions." This was the so-calledTTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously theatmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from anactual computer model of climate.