Climate McCarthyism*

[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]

As regular visitors to this space know well, there is no basis for the claim, put forth by President Obama and other radical environmentalists, that “97 percent” of scientists believe in Global Warming theory. They repeat this imaginary statistic over and over because, when it comes to real science, they got nuthin’.

In place of scientific argument, they rely on intimidation and censorship. Some recent examples:

►The National Center for Science Education—which, despite its name, promotes the dumbing-down of science education—is conducting a campaign to stop teachers from getting access to the work of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists who compiled thousands of pages of research exposing Warmers’ errors and who sent that research to teachers and the media. As seen at left, NCSE’s website encourages people to “Track the denialist NIPCC mailing. . . . NCSE is tracking this mailing and working to ensure it doesn’t harm science education, but we need your help.” NCSE accuses the scientists of being “funded by Big Tobacco and Big Oil.”  Said NCSE: “This mailing undermines science education and subverts the strong and consistent guidance teachers increasingly receive from statewide science standards, textbooks, and professional societies: teach climate change throughout the curriculum. . . . Please fill out the form below so we can know who was targeted, and who escaped the mailing. Please also urge your friends and colleagues who may have been targeted to do the same.” [See http://ncse.com/taking-action/track-denialist-nipcc-mailing .]

►Some liberals and leftists who actually care about the world’s poor are beginning to rebel against Global Warming extremism. Dr. Caleb Rossiter, associate fellow at the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use. But that is the opposite of what’s desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.” Rossiter, a statistician, notes the scientific fact that “climate change” models have failed, but he is concerned that “The left wants to stop industrialization–even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false.”

Surprise! After publishing the op-ed, Rossiter received an e-mail from IPS informing him that “we are terminating your position . . . [Y]our views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy on Africa, diverge so significantly from ours.”

►Likewise, Lennart Bengtsson, the well-respected former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, joined the pro-science Global Warming Policy Foundation and suffered the consequences. The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel noted: “Bengtsson insists that even close colleagues shunned him. He says that one research partner, apparently fearing damage to his reputation, withdrew from a study they had been conducting together. . . . The scientific journal Environmental Research Letters declined to publish a study he had authored predicting a milder greenhouse effect. Peer reviewers described the report’s findings as ‘less than helpful’”—in other words, reviewers worried that his results might end up hurting the Warming cause. “Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform,” the magazine noted. “They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.”

These reports of so-called Climate McCarthyism* are important because Warmers use the alleged “scientific consensus” on Warming to persuade people of the rightness of their cause. They say, in effect: Ignore the actual scientific evidence in front of you, and listen to the experts—experts who must go along with the Warmers if they know what’s good for them. It’s the “scientific consensus,” Mafia-style.

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* A difference between “McCarthyism” and “Climate McCarthyism” being that Joe McCarthy apparently never accused an innocent person. See the recent works on the Cold War by M. Stanton Evans.