Climate Change Hysteria Going Overboard

From Jonah Goldberg in National Review:

One of the hallmarks of the “Ugly American” is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you’re saying if just shout it louder and louder.

The Ugly Environmentalist does something similar. He exaggerates the challenge of global warming by using ever more hysterical rhetoric, thinking that if the last doomsday prediction didn’t work, this one will.

For instance, Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist, recently said that the consequences of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord were monumental: “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees (Celsius), and raining sulfuric acid.”

As Nathan Cofnas notes in the Weekly Standard, this is nuts. The share of the atmosphere taken up by that vile gas carbon dioxide (which just happens to sustain all plant life) is 400 parts per million. It’s been much higher than that in the past without boiling the oceans or raining acid from the sky. Cofnas also mentions that Venus is nearly 26 million miles closer to the sun, and that the share of carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere is 965,000 parts per million, or about 2,412 times greater than Earth’s.

And that’s Hawking, a serious scientist (at least in his own field). Journalists, always looking for novelty and drama, can be worse. A recent New York magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate-change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a reenactment of a Mad Max movie.

The more you sound like some cowbell-wielding street preacher wearing a sandwich board that says “The End Is Nigh!” the more likely it is that people will ignore you. Particularly if your last few terrifying predictions didn’t pan out.

But this focus on how using scare tactics doesn’t persuade skeptics overlooks another problem. What about the people it does persuade? If you honestly believe that climate change will end all life on earth (it won’t) or lead to some dystopian hell where we use the skulls of our former friends and neighbors to collect water droplets from cacti, what policies wouldn’t you endorse to stop it?

There’s a rich school of journalistic and academic nonsense out there about how democracy may not be up to the job of fighting climate change, and why people who question climate change must be silenced by the state. It’s remarkable how many of the people who rightly recoil in horror at the idea of using, say, the war on terror to justify curtailing civil liberties have no such response when someone floats similar ideas for the war on climate change.

The environment editor for the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian, Damian Carrington, recently wrote a piece fretting about how having kids doesn’t help fight climate change. Jill Filipovic, a feminist writer, endorsed the article. “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet,” she wrote on Twitter. “Have one less and conserve resources.”

I found this interestingly dumb. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers you’d expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if it’s in the name of the environment? Let’s wag those fingers, everybody!

But is that really the point? Or worse? Could it be that the “climate change” crowd is so keen on this issue, and so given to hysterics, because deep down they want an excuse to dictate people’s lifestyles? Not only could it be, it is.

Science Guy: Punish Climate Skeptics

Global Warming Fascism: Use Government to Shut Up Skepticism

From the Wall Street Journal, an article about the bullying and intimidation deployed against any group that takes a less than alarmist view of global warming.

Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail—in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo—the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

Environmental Naziism: Punish Politicians Who Don’t Accept Global Warming

This fellow is not new to this blog: David Suzuki, who has said he wants to imprison politicians who disagree with him about global warming.

He hasn’t recanted or backed off, as this video clip shows.



If you watch is, you will notice that the audience applauds when Suzuki suggests legal punishment for people who don’t accept his view of the issue.

In other words, this kind of environmental fascism is not just some idiosyncratic notion on Suzuki’s part. Quite a substantial number of liberals and leftists would punish people who disagree with them on this issue. And of course, other issues too.

Witchhunt: Global Warming Believers Attack and Threaten Skeptics

This is not new, but we just ran across it. From Climate Depot, an account of how a blogger at Talking Points Memo asked “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers. . . . Shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

A public appeal has been issued by an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The anonymous posting, dated June 2, 2009, referred to dissenters of man-made global warming fears as “greedy bastards” who use “bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool” to “distort data.”

The Talking Points Memo article continues: “So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

The article also claims the “vast majority” of scientists agree that man-made warming “can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.”

The full text of the Talking Points Memo is reproduced below:

(Note: The entry is posted under the anonymous byline “The Insolent Braggart”)

At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers

June 2, 2009, 9:42PM

What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don’t want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it’s a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.

So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?

We are happy to report that the blogger in question repented and apologized. Unfortunately, some things are hard to take back. The fact that you said it in the first place is damning. Further, the retraction seemed to be because (in the blogger’s words) “I did true harm to this site, as well as the cause of global warming research.”

Would he have repented if his tirade had helped the movement?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). Some of the other goodies include:

Climate Depot Editor’s Note:

The Talking Points Memo appeal to execute skeptics is not unique. As the science behind man-made global warming fears utterly collapses, many of the biggest promoters of the theory and environmental activists are growing increasingly desperate. Looming Question: If the promoters of man-made climate fears truly believed the “debate is over” and the science is “settled,” why is there such a strong impulse to shut down debate and threaten those who disagree?

Small sampling of threats, intimidation and censorship:

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.”

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics in 2007, declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors”

In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEOs “should be in jail... for all of eternity.”

In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.”

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics.

In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown “into jail.”

In 2007, The Weather Channel’s climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.

A 2008 report found that “climate blasphemy” is replacing traditional religious blasphemy. In addition, a July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.

In 2007, then EPA Chief Vowed to Probe E-mail Threatening to “Destroy” Career of Climate Skeptic and dissenters of warming fears have been called “Climate Criminals” who are committing “Terracide” (killing of Planet Earth) (July 25, 2007)

In addition, in May 2009, Climate Depot Was Banned in Louisiana! See: State official sought to “shut down” climate skeptic’s testimony at hearing.

Below are many more examples of the threats, name calling and intimidation skeptics have faced in recent times.

November 12, 2007: UN official warns ignoring warming would be “criminally irresponsible” Excerpt: The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.” Yvo de Boer’s comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating.

September 29. 2007: VA State Climatologist skeptical of global warming loses job after clash with Governor: “I was told that I could not speak in public” Excerpt: Michaels has argued that the climate is becoming warmer but that the consequences will not be as dire as others have predicted. Gov. Kaine had warned. Michaels not to use his official title in discussing his views. “I resigned as Virginia state climatologist because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist,” Michaels said in a statement this week provided by the libertarian Cato Institute, where he has been a fellow since 1992. “It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction.” (LINK)

Skeptical State Climatologist in Oregon has title threatened by Governor (February 8, 2007) Excerpt: “[State Climatologist George Taylor] does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change...So the [Oregon] governor wants to take that title from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint. In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title from Taylor.

Skeptical State Climatologist in Delaware silenced by Governor (May 2, 2007) Excerpt: Legates is a state climatologist in Delaware, and he teaches at the university. He`s not part of the mythical climate consensus. In fact, Legates believes that we oversimplify climate by just blaming greenhouse gases. One day he received a letter from the governor, saying his views do not concur with those of the administration, so if he wants to speak out, it must be as an individual, not as a state climatologist. So essentially, you can have the title of state climatologist unless he`s talking about his views on climate?

October 28, 2008: License to dissent: “Internet should be nationalized as a public utility to combat global warming skepticism - Australian Herald Sun - Excerpt: British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Skeptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options: There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate skepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation. One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google’s Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalized as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, “giving power over the Internet to well-heeled interests and self-interested politicians” is, and I quote, “a bad idea.” Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog...

November 5, 2008: UK Scientist: “BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE” – UK Daily Express
Excerpt: FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.

U.N. official says it’s “completely immoral” to doubt global warming fears (May 10, 2007)
Excerpt: UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus.”

Former US Vice President Al Gore compared global warming skeptics to people who “believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona”
(June 20, 2006)

Gore Refuses to Hear Skeptical Global Warming Views (Video)

UK environment secretary David Miliband said “those who deny [climate change] are the flat-Earthers of the twenty-first century.”(October 6, 2006)

Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics

(January 17, 2007) Excerpt: The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

Barone: Warmists have “a desire to kill heretics” -- Calls for capital punishment for “global warming deniers” - DC Examiner - June 9, 2009

Strangle Skeptics in Bed! “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds” - June 5, 2009

In theory, none of this proves that anthropogenic global warming isn’t happening. After all, fanatics are sometimes right.

But in reality, fanaticism makes us doubt the empirical judgments of the fanatics. It makes us suspect that they are driven by some inner lust for righteousness, purity and orthodoxy that distorts their assessments of facts.

Add to this the fact that people who are confident of their position generally seek discussion and debate, and tolerate people who have different views.

Obviously, not all believers in anthropogenic global warming are fanatics. A lot are simply people who go along with what they have been told.

But the fanatics are not marginal figures (see above). A movement that creates such fanaticism has to be viewed with skepticism.

Professor Berates, Attacks Students Who Question Global Warming Policies

From CampusReform.org:

A video about Prof. Bradley Schaefer, an astronomy professor at Louisiana State University who made students seat themselves according to their views on policy toward “global warming.”

Here is the seating chart.

He then began to attack and berate students who failed to endorse liberal policies on the issue.

“You will not want your children, if they live, why you’re sitting on that corner, that you’re part of the the trouble, right?” he says. Then he tells another student, “Too little, too late. Blood will be on your hands.”

Schaefer’s department chair conceded “I will confess that while this film was heavily edited, it looks pretty embarrassing. I think it’s probably fair to say he was not sufficiently sensitive.”

We’ve written Prof. Schaefer asking for comment, and will report his reply.



[Update]

A commenter on the web page we linked to claimed that Schaefer is the victim of selective editing. Specifically:

The truth of the matter is that this was an intellectual exercise. The professor did seperate [sic] the class by their self reported political beliefs, but then he attacked the views of both sides. The folks who run this site left that part out though because it doesn’t fit the story they are trying to spin.

And further, quoting Schaefer:

“You want to get rid of the internal combustion engine,” he said mockingly to self-identified liberals. “How many people are going to die with that? How are you going to feed the people in the cities?”

The problem with this argument is that all the “middle” positions he did not attack were in fact liberal positions.

See the seating chart below (and you can click on the graphic and see it full size).


So the exercise was a bit like putting Communists on one side of the room, and Republicans on the other, and “even-handedly” attacking both, leaving the liberals unmolested.

CampusReform.org has posted the full, unedited video. If anything, it’s worse that the edited version they originally posted.

[Further Update]

Another version of the video shows Schaefer suggesting that India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons, might use them to attack the U.S. because of our failure to adopt the policies he favors.

Explaining the 10:10 Global Warming/Blowing Up Kids Video

From Forbes, at attempt to explain the mentality behind the video that showed global warming skeptics (including children) being blown to bits.

By hammering for years on the motivations, rather than the science, of skeptics, environmental leaders have built a community of supporters who believe to their core that skeptics are actively plotting to destroy the Earth. While no one would consider violence or government action against those who are arguing questions of science in a fact-based manner, it is not a very long step to advocating such extreme consequences for people one thinks are hatching a Dr. Evil-like plot to destroy the Earth.

In fact, it has not been unusual for prominent activists to publicly call for dire punishments of skeptics. In 2008, NASA’s James Hansen, a leading global warming alarmist, used a speech before Congress to argue that oil company executives should be “put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature” for fostering doubt about global warming. Robert Kennedy, Jr. called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and said that one coal CEO “should be in jail … for all eternity” both for selling a high-carbon product and being publicly skeptical of global warming. Anonymous web posts calling for death to climate skeptics are practically routine, with one blog post (later deleted) at leftish Talking Points Memo asking “at what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?”

And thus I think we can better understand how a group of probably well-meaning activists and film-makers could create such crazy, totalitarian vision. In many ways, the film reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds,” which is a fantasy film about a group of Jewish soldiers killing Hitler and his high command. Viewers are not offended by the bloodshed and brutality, because the fantasy is so delicious. The same must have been true for those who created and screened the 10:10 video prior to its release.

Rather than an isolated aberration, then, the 10:10 video can be seen as the end result of years of ad hominem attacks meant to marginalize skeptics and make it unnecessary to actually address their concerns about the science. Perhaps this video will mark a turning point where we can finally start talking about the science rather than attacking motivations.

Global Warming Fascism: A Roundup

ClimateGate, much in the news recently, is a scandal that erupted when a bunch of e-mails from a British climate center were leaked, showing scientists literally conspiring to cook data to support the idea of global warming, conspiring to withhold data from critical scrutiny, and to prevent the publication of views they didn’t like.

While it has made a big splash only recently, it is merely an outcropping of something that has been around for years.

A climate “concensus” in the political and scientific communities has taken on the character of a relgious dogma, with heretics being fired, banished, threatened or shunned.

A web page called Stifling Decent (pun intended), by Roger King, has the details. They are hair-raising.

Being a Global Warming Skeptic

From (of all places) the New York Times Magazine:

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

The fact that anthropogenic global warming has become a sort of faux religion is important.

It’s no accident that environmentalists tend to be secular -- atheists and agnostics. When one decides that one does not believe in God, the desire for personal righteousness does not go away. It has to be redirected.

In the environmental movement, it has been redirected into a kind of pantheism in which nature is sacred, and any tampering with nature is a kind of blasphemy.

And those who disagree with the orthodoxy are heretics endangering the True Faith, and need to be shut up.

Obama’s Science Guy: Long Trail of Absurd Claims

From Jeff Jacoby, an exposé of the fellow that Barack Obama has chosen to advise him on matters scientific. The Senate, however, has to approve the appointment. There is little chance it will get rejected, but some Senator with a backbone might ask a few tough questions.

IN NOMINATING John Holdren to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy -- the position known informally as White House science adviser -- President-elect Barack Obama has enlisted an undisputed Big Name among academic environmentalists. . . .

He is also a doom-and-gloomer with a trail of erroneous apocalyptic forecasts dating back nearly 40 years -- and a decided lack of tolerance for environmental opinions that conflict with his. . . but conscientious senators might wish to ask him some questions. Here are eight

1. You were long associated with population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, and joined him in predicting disasters that never came to pass. For example, you and Ehrlich wrote in 1969: “It cannot be emphasized enough that if . . . population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.” In 1971, the two of you were adamant that “some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.” In the 1980s, Ehrlich quoted your expectation that “carbon dioxide-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.” What have you learned from the failure of these prophecies to come true?

2. You have advocated the “long-term desirability of zero population growth” for the United States. In 1973, you pronounced the US population of 210 million as “too many” and warned that “280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many.” The US population today is 304 million. Are there too many Americans?

3. You opposed the Reagan administration’s military buildup in the 1980s for fear it might “increase the belligerency of the Soviet government.” You pooh-poohed any notion that “the strain of an accelerated arms race will do more damage to the Soviet economy than to our own,” or that “damaging the Soviet economy would benefit the US.” But that is exactly what happened, and President Reagan’s defense buildup helped win the Cold War. Did that outcome alter your thinking on military questions?

4. You argued that “a massive campaign must be launched . . . to de-develop the United States” in order to conserve energy; you also recommended the “de-development” of modern industrialized nations in order to facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries. Yet elsewhere you observed: “Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” Which is it?

5. In Scientific American, you recently wrote: “The ongoing disruption of the Earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” An interview you gave to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was headlined “The Sky Is Falling.” Given your record with forecasting calamity, shouldn’t policymakers view your alarm with a degree of skepticism?

6. In 2006, according to the London Times, you suggested that global sea levels could rise 13 feet by the end of this century. But the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea levels are likely to have risen only 13 inches by 2100. Can you explain the discrepancy between your estimate and the IPCC’s?

7. “Variability has been the hallmark of climate over the millennia,” you wrote in 1977. “The one statement about future climate that can be made with complete assurance is that it will be variable.” If true, should we not be wary of ascribing too much importance to human influence on climate change?

8. You are withering in your contempt for researchers who are unconvinced that human activity is responsible for global warming, or that global warming is an onrushing disaster. You have written that such ideas are “dangerous,” that those who hold them “infest” the public discourse, and that paying any attention to their views is “a menace.” You contributed to a published assault on Bjorn Lomborg’s notable 2001 book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” -- an attack the Economist described as “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.” In light of President-elect Obama’s insistence that “promoting science” means “protecting free and open inquiry,” will you work to soften your hostility toward scholars who disagree with you?

It’s almost a cliché that environmentalism is a religion. Indeed, it’s pretty much the religion of those who don’t believe in God -- which is the say the religion of the elites who are heavily overrepresented in the Democratic Party.

So the irony is that the people in America today who most resemble the liberal stereotype of the fundamentalist bible thumper are are the liberal environmentalists themselves. John Holdren is the Elmer Gantry of the group.

Physicists Group: Global Warming Open Issue

The utterly offensive thing about the whole “global warming” movement has been its attempt to stifle discussion, demean and marginalize critics and make their views the official orthodoxy -- dissent from which merits punishment.

You can see examples here, and here and here.

The fascists have received a major setback from members of an important scholarly organization.

In a posting to the [Forum on Physics & Society of the American Physical Society], editor Jeffrey Marque explains,“There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors.”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

Note that the larger organization, the American Physical Society, has not blacked off it’s official position that there is anthropogenic global warming. The bureaucrats who head these scholarly organizations tend to take the standard politically correct position, and physicists (like academics generally) skew heavily liberal, and can be expected to favor any notion that increases government’s power over the economy.

But quite reputable scientists within the organization disagree. And there is apparently enough academic freedom within the organization for them to engage the debate.

Pam’s House Blend: The Voice of Politically Correct Fascism

Sometimes intolerance comes in such a pure an unadulterated form that it has special interest -- more or less as a Weberian “ideal type” of political correctness.

Thus we have Pam’s House Blend.

The links post is an extended discussion of how views that Pam doesn’t like need to be shut up.

She starts off with the usual list of views that she thinks ought to be suppressed.

If you look on the Internet today, you can find lots of “White Power” racism and Anti-Semitic horror writing and preaching. Christianity backs up the hatred on these websites. Yet no mainstream church admits these jerks in their sanctuaries, prayers, dogma, General Sessions, writings, or websites. No city’s newspaper grants them stories or will accept their ads. They are “shut up” in the USA.

You can even find pro-slavery advocates on the Net, I bet. But they too would not be allowed lectern space on any university campus in the USA.

Of course, any church has the right to ignore or refute any ideas they don’t like. And newspapers get to decide for themselves what opinion pieces they want to print.

So far so good.

But Pam’s point is that certain views should be banned from universities. Further, she doesn’t bother to distinguish between private universities (which can ban ideas they want to ban) and public universities (which are bound by the First Amendment).

But she is just setting the stage for an idea she really hates: the view that homosexuals are not born with a fixed (hard wired) sexual orientation that cannot change.

The American Psychiatric Association and all scientific associations and reputable medical groups in the Western world agree . . . homosexuality is not a sickness, an illness, nor an abnormality. Homosexuality is completely normal.

Some religious leaders label homosexual acts as sinful to their god. Some religious leaders label homosexual orientation as intrinsically evil. So be it. Many religions agree that homosexuality is completely normal and a real blessing.

Science and religion don’t always agree. Surprise, surprise.

The conservative Christian author of a book disputing science “The Born Gay Hoax” sought an invitation from the Republican Club at Smith College. During his speech to the women students, lesbian entered the hall, beat pans, and chanted. The speaker could not continue. He left the hall. The lesbians effectively silenced him.

She goes on to make it clear she approves of that.

Just like we would stifle speech advocating slavery, anti-Semitism, or racism. When Andy Humm, the host of Gay USA on Free Speech TV, found himself on a TV Talk Show opposite a reparative therapy counselor, he refused to speak with the counselor. Instead he spent the entire time speaking with the host of the show. He wanted to know how the host dared invite such an irresponsible person as the reparative therapist to the TV show. Andy went on and on about how the therapist and others like him hurt so very many people ... but he never engaged the therapist ... he ignored him completely.

I think Andy’s tactic was brilliant. I have to admit, I think those bloggers who criticized the Smith women were wrong. The Smith lesbian were right on the money. We do NOT need to invite crazy people to our campuses, churches, or civic centers. The whole western world already knows that homosexuality is completely normal. The jury is back, the verdict is in, the case is over. Case closed. Debate over.

The wingnuts can argue among themselves. They can hold the debate right along side an explanation of the world being only 6,000 years old and the earth being flat. Have at it.

But not at respectable universities, in respectable newspapers, or in the town square. The case is over and the wingnuts lost. If the wingnuts try to speak there, I will be there hitting pans and chanting with the lesbians!! It seems to be the only thing the wingnuts understand.

This sort of thinking is all too common on the politically correct left, including Marquette. As we have discussed, about two years ago, the then president of the Gay/Straight Alliance at Marquette proclaimed that no speaker opposing gay marriage should be allowed on the Marquette campus, since any such speech would constitute “hate speech.”

And the notion that “science has spoken” is echoed by the advocates of anthropogenic global warming -- who are also intent on shutting up debate.

“Science” in modern society has a certain mystique, but the simple fact is that, when science approached political issues, it is typically contaminated by three factors.

• Ideology. Scientists, like other academics, lean to the left and instinctively favor “findings” that help the left. Where homosexuality is concerned, that means promoting the agenda of the gay lobby. Where global warming is concerned, it means loudly insisting on massive government intervention in the economy.
• Careerism. If there is money to be made, articles in prestigious journals to be published or promotions to be gained by pushing a particular point of view, plenty of them will do it.
• Groupthink. Like any other group, scientists tend to live in a rather isolated little world, and tend to believe and accept what “everybody says.”

Historically, the same sort of people who are now telling us about anthropogenic global warming were, 100 years ago, promoting eugenics. In the 70s they were promising a “New Ice Age.” In the early 70s there were promising the collapse of civilization due to the depletion of natural resources (check out the Club of Rome Report). A few years before that, there was The Population Bomb. Disaster, we were told, would come from a rapidly expanding number of people in the world.

The politically correct, of course, ignore science when it’s inconvenient. Economic science says the minimum wage is a bad idea. The lefties could care less.

Of course, if the mass of the evidence really was on one side of these issues, the people on the side of the evidence would welcome the opportunity to debate, since they they could routinely win the debate.

We, for example, love to debate liberals on the issue on the death penalty.

But the politically correct don’t want to debate issues. They want to shut up the other side.

Which tells us that, deep down, they actually have little confidence in the positions they so loudly proclaim.

Jail Global Warming Skeptics?

Via the Reason blog, an account of how a prominent Canadian political figure wants to imprison people who disagree with him on anthropogenic global warming.

David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.

At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month.

The proposal has lit up many conservative blogs since it was first reported by the McGill Daily on Monday.

Addressing the McGill Business Conference on Sustainability, hosted by the Faculty of Management, Dr. Suzuki’s wide-ranging speech warned against favouring the economy to the detriment of the ecology -- the tarsands in Northern Alberta being his prime example.

“You have lived your entire lives in a completely unsustainable period,” he told students and fans. “You all think growth and [climate] change is normal. It’s not.”

Toward the end of his speech, Dr. Suzuki said that “we can no longer tolerate what’s going on in Ottawa and Edmonton” and then encouraged attendees to hold politicians to a greater green standard.

“What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“It’s an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years.”

The statement elicited rounds of applause.

If somebody can be locked up in Canada or Europe for saying that homosexual acts are sinful (and they can), why not lock people up for saying politically incorrect things about climate change?

Alexander Cockburn has felt the full fury of the moralistic crusaders, and explains what he faced.

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.

There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word ‘denier’ to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. ‘Climate change denier’ is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier. This was contrived to demonise sceptics. The past few years show clearly how mass moral panics and intellectual panics become engendered.

The key thing here is that environmentalists, and indeed the left generally, are secular. They don’t believe in God, and don’t like religion.

But not believing in God doesn’t change the fact that people have a deep desire to feel righteous, to feel clean and redeemed and right with God -- or with something equivalent to God.

Environmentalists fulfil this need with environmentalism, and like the least tolerant religious people want to cleanse the world of unrighteousness. They want heresy stifled. They want goodness and virtue to prevail -- by force if necessary.

And they are quick to decide that force will be necessary.