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.

Changing Climate on Climate Change

From George Will:

WASHINGTON -- Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear now the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

“They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder -- and I hope they put it on their faces every day.”

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity -- hysteria and name calling accompanying serene assertions about the “settled science” of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner’s “Shut up, he explained.”

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children’s story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen “evidence” of global warming.

But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World’s Last -- We Really, Really Mean It -- Chance, aka the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven Western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state’s participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. She worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona’s strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California’s, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: “We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers.” What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today’s, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today’s supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Will goes on to opine that global warming has become a kind of religion.

And indeed it, and environmentalism generally, is. People have a deep-seated desire to feel “saved.” The fact that they may come from a culture where going to church and engaging in sexual restraint is derided doesn’t change that.

So the deep-seated desire for righteousness expresses itself in environmentalism. But like traditional moralists, they are not content to merely live righteous lives. They demand the right to force their notions of righteousness on everybody.

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.