Global Warming Fascism

We fully expect people to get pretty hot under the collar about hot-button social issues like abortion, gay marriage and affirmative action.

It’s not even surprising when people on one side of the debate try to shut up people on the other side. The gay lobby is particularly likely to do this, as cases in Canada, in the U.K., in U.S. schools of Social Work, and indeed from the Gay/Straight Alliance right here at Marquette.

But what about an issue like supposed “global warming?” That’s an arcane scientific issue, right? People should be tolerant of differing views, right?

Apparently not.

Case One: Punish Meteorologists Who Question Global Warming

From The Independent:

A leading climatologist on the Weather Channel in the United States has caused a squall in the industry by arguing that any weather forecaster who dares publicly to question the notion that global warming is a manmade phenomenon should be stripped of their professional certification.

The call was made by Heidi Cullen, host of a weekly global warming programme on the cable network called The Climate Code, and coincides with a stretch of severely off-kilter weather across the US this winter and moves by Democrats to draft strict new legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Specifically, Ms Cullen is suggesting that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revokes the “seal of approval” that it normally extends to broadcast forecasters in the US in cases where they have expressed scepticism about man’s role in pushing up planetary temperatures.

“It’s like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather,” she wrote in her internet blog. “It’s not a political statement . . . it’s just an incorrect statement.”

Ms Cullen is not alone in trying to marginalise doubters, who mostly argue that recent rises in temperatures are caused by normal cyclical weather patterns. They were described as “global warming deniers” by former vice-president Al Gore in his recent film An Inconvenient Truth.

The problem is that whether hurricanes rotate clockwise (in the northern hemisphere) is not a controversial political issue, while global warming is.

Claiming that global warming as a result of human activity has been “proven” to the satisfaction of all serious scientists is simply untrue.

But note that, even if it had been, a century ago it had been “proven” to the satisfaction of scientists who dealt with human intelligence that blacks were less intelligent than whites.

Just thirty years ago, the media were abuzz with predications of a “New Ice Age.”

There really is a strong consensus among economists that the Minimum Wage is a bad idea. Should any economist who favors that policy have his Ph.D. revoked? Should any academic who says that a centrally planned economy is better than a market economy be fired for incompetence?

Case Two: Senators Try To Intimidate Oil Company

This page October, liberal Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe sent a letter to the CEO of ExxonMobil Corporation demanding that it cease funding of scientists who are critical of the “global warming theory.” The following passage gives an idea of the tone of the letter:

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world’s largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

Coming from members of Congress, such a demand has to be considered a threat of adverse political action.

As the Wall Street Journal noted:

The Senators aren’t dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can’t refuse. But in case the CEO doesn’t understand his company’s jeopardy, they add that “ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years.” [Our emphasis.]

The Journal goes on to observe:

Every dogma has its day, and we’ve lived long enough to see more than one “consensus” blown apart within a few years of “everyone knowing” it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they’ve made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it’s useful to have a few folks outside the “consensus” asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Case Three: Put Global Warming Skeptics on Trial

Jeff Jacoby explains what some of the environmentalists have been saying.

Then there is “Grist,” an environmental webzine whose staff writer David Roberts recently proposed that global warming skeptics be put on trial like Nazi war criminals.

“When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming . . . we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg,” Roberts wrote. Negative publicity led him to recant, but he is far from the only one invoking the Holocaust as a way to silence global warming heretics.

Environmental writer Mark Lynas, for example, puts dissent on climate change “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial -- except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.” This totalitarian view is taking root everywhere, making skepticism on climate change taboo and subjecting anyone reckless enough to question the global-warming dogma to mockery and demonization. Former vice president Al Gore lumps “global warming deniers,” some of whom are eminent scientists, with the “15 percent of the population (who) believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona” and those who “still believe the earth is flat.”

In any moralistic crusade, a diversity of opinions is not welcome. What matters is orthodoxy, and the urge to silence heretics is intense.

Letter to the Editor: Global Warming Fascism

Here is an e-mail Letter to the Editor written in response to our post on Global Warming Fascism. In that post, we discussed the suggestion, by global warming believers, that people who deny global warming should be put on trial and punished for their heresy.

Suggesting that “warming skeptics be put on trial like Nazi war criminals” shows a woeful lack of historical understanding. Who stifled thought outside of the mainstream? Who imprisoned the nonconformist? Using the denial of the holocaust is logically absurd for reasons you point out.

Yet there is an analogy regarding the Nazis though. Consider the study of eugenics that was popular in 1930s Germany. The German scientific community was bullied into, if not accepting, at least not criticizing, certain “scientific truths” regarding the racial characteristics of the Jews.

It is getting pretty scary when people such as Heidi Cullen and David Roberts want to punish dissent. They are becoming more strident and vicious and would be defenders of freedom are becoming more cowed. The academic and media establishments have a very distorted view of freedom. They insist on absolute freedom to expound any ridiculous ideas without having their logic questioned. Cranks such as Ward Churchill and Kevin Barrett can rant what meets any definition of hate speech at public expense while potential dissenters are restricted from using their 1st amendment rights in the name of campaign finance reform.

Keep up the good work.

Roger Cross
Another Marquette Warrior
Class of ‘69

More Global Warming Fascism

We’ve already blogged about the increasingly hysterical tone of those who believe that global warming is the result of human activity, and their intolerance of alternative views.

There is still more evidence on this point. First, Al Gore attacks those who disagree with him.

MADRID , SPAIN (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore said in an interview on Tuesday the Bush administration is now paying scientists to dispute global warming since the administration can no longer argue against it.

During an interview with CNN affiliate Cuatro in Madrid, Gore said, “they’ve lost the argument and they don’t want to stop dumping all this pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere. The only thing they have left is cash and now they’re offering cash for so-called skeptics who will try to confuse people about what the science really say. But it’s unethical because now the time has come when we have to act.”

Gore was the Democratic nominee against Bush in the 2004 presidential election. His film, An Inconvenient Truth, is up for the best documentary Oscar.

But global warming skeptics are not only being derided, they are being fired from their positions.

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.

Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are “very likely” the cause.

“Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations,” Taylor asserts.

His opinions conflict not only with many other scientists, but with the state of Oregon’s policies.

In other words, scientists whose views conflict with the government’s policies need to be shut up and silenced.

Politics determines science.

Note that Taylor would not lose his job as a professor. Only the title State Climatologist.

But people trying to make rational policy -- rather than wage a moralistic crusade -- want to hear competing opinions, and welcome challenges to the conventional wisdom.

Yet More Environmental Fascism: Put Global Warming Skeptics on Trial

From The Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: “When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.”

This is just the latest example of how the environmental jihadists advocate punishing those who disagree with them about anthropogenic global warming.

They, of course, invoke the precedent of the tobacco companies, who supposedly lied about the negative effects of smoking. But the looting of the tobacco companies was a shameful episode in the history of American jurisprudence.

Leaving aside the fact there there is plenty of room for skepticism about global warming, and plenty of reputable scientists who reject the hysteria, deciding your opponent is “lying” and therefore should be prosecuted for saying things you disagree with is simply way too convenient a way of silencing dissent.

The prevalence of this sort of fanaticism actually casts doubt on the scientific judgment of the scientists trying to shut up the debate.

If they are so driven to punish people who question anthropogenic global warming, are there some things about their beliefs and personality that cause them to (conveniently) exaggerate the threat and interpret the data in a biased way?

Are they not moralistic crusaders whose scientific views and legal views are both being driven by their fanaticism?

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.

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.

More Global Warming Fascism: Australia

Academia is more and more intolerant, and one of the tenets of the new orthodoxy is the idea that there is global warming, that human activity is the main cause of it, that it has potentially catastrophic consequences, and that radical policies have to be immediately enacted to deal with it.

Dissenting from any one of these propositions can lead to demands that you be fired, silenced, shunned and banned from public discourse.

And this indeed is exactly what happened at the University of Western Australia, where a climate change “contrarian” named Bjorn Lomborg was banned and denied a job because of his views.

We frankly wonder whether something like this could happen at Marquette. While faculty of natural science departments are mostly not into race, gender and sexual orientation political correctness, there is a certain kind of science political correctness. The prevailing attitude is “we scientists have discovered the truth, and don’t you dare doubt what we say.”

A writer for Reason makes some points that people in academia used to understand, but increasingly appear not to:

Learning is a process of testing, discussion, submitting your ideas to debate and standing by them as the brickbats of disagreement and counter-argument come flying in. This is why academic freedom is so important: the liberty to think and speak and argue is the only real way of getting to the truth of a matter, and in the process boosting our understanding of the world.

In the Lomborg scandal, this process was circumvented. Lomborg’s center was pre-emptively denied the right to put its case in Australian academia, by “passionate emotional” protesters who think they already know The Truth on climate change: that it’s happening, it’s terrible, and we will only alleviate its worst impacts by putting restraints on humanity’s material aspirations.

This isn’t learning, far less academic freedom in action. Rather, it echoes the old, pre-modern view of a university as, in essence, a bookish guardian of ecclesiastical authority. Only now it’s eco-authority that is protected from intellectual poking and awkward analysis, ringfenced from ridicule just as surely as the pointy-hatted overseers of universities in the pre-Enlightenment era also ringfenced ideas that they just knew were true.

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.

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.