Republican senators read Anthony Fauci the riot act at the recent Senate hearing about the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ personal and public machinations during the disastrous COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was eloquent in blasting Fauci for saying one thing and doing another, all the while personally profiting from the global tragedy. But it was Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) words to Fauci that are most memorable:
It wasn’t just about the money, really, was it? It was really about a power trip. I mean, through all of this, you want to be the most famous scientist in the world. You were so focused on getting every award and every drop of cash that you could, all because you wanted to be on TV. You wanted to be the Sun God of Science. You wanted to be the guy who was in charge of it all.
The “Sun God of Science” comment resonates — and not just because Fauci previously boasted that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” and “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.” It resonates because Fauci is emblematic of a breed of scientist whose scientific work takes a remote back seat to his overblown ego and non-science agenda.
Another area of science that has its share of sun gods is climate. Former chief NASA climate scientist James Hansen launched the climate hoax with his infamous June 1988 Senate testimony, held during a heat wave and in a Senate room where staffers had left the windows open overnight. After launching climate hysteria and then two decades of promoting it, Hansen had the temerity to accuse the Bush administration in 2006 of trying to censor him because it wanted to review his (a government employee’s) public statements on climate.
Another climate sun god for the books is Michael Mann, whose infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph and intrigues against climate skeptics were exposed by the 2009 Climategate scandal. Subsequent criticism of Mann led to an ongoing 14-year defamation lawsuit, in which Mann wound up being sanctioned by the trial judge for providing false evidence to the jury on the key issue (damages). Mann has even falsely claimed to be a Nobel Prize winner.
Despite all this, Mann was nevertheless cited as a credible source by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) — a veritable museum of dubious Sun Gods of Science — in the now-exposed and discredited scientific reference manual for judges it prepared last year for the Federal Judicial Center.
The NAS allowed the manual’s chapter on climate science to be written by climate activists involved in pending litigation against the oil industry. Although the Federal Judicial Center removed the climate chapter from its own edition, NAS retained it in the copy on its website.
Scientists must be judged by the tangible scientific knowledge and gains they produce — not the size and marketing of their egos. Neither Fauci, Hansen, nor Mann has any Nobel Prize-level scientific accomplishment under their belts. They have never earned any special deference from the rest of us mere mortals. Instead, Fauci helped fuel the COVID pandemic, and Hansen and Mann promoted climate panic — both of which have been disastrous for science and the society that science is supposed to serve.
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Steve Milloy is a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute and posts on X at @JunkScience.
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