My compatriot David Suzuki, CC, OBC, was on PBS with Bill Moyers the other day and re-iterated for Americans his previously stated position in Canada that climate-denying politicians should be jailed:
"Our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness!" he asserted. "If we are in a position of being able to act, and we see something going on and we refuse to acknowledge the threat or act on it, we can be taken to court for willful blindness."
Suzuki seems to be willfully blind to his own ignorance: after his spectacular know-nothing performance on the ABC's Q&A Down Under last year, I'm amazed his minders still let him do TV, even with tongue-bath interrogators like Moyers. As I said a couple of days ago, a lot of these guys are a planet wide and an inch deep - especially those at the eco-totalitarian end. (Ezra Levant and I discussed the Suzuki beclowning about halfway through this show.) I suppose we should be grateful the ayatollah of alarmism only wants deniers "thrown in the slammer" rather than, as Professor Richard Parncutt favors, executed.
The climate mullahs don't seem to grasp that this is why they're going nowhere. As James Delingpole points out, "climate change" is the biggest PR flopperoo of all time:
It was once conservatively estimated (by blogger Richard North) that the cost of propping up the global warming industry since 1989 was equivalent in real terms to five Manhattan Projects. But that was back in 2010, since when spending on green boondoggles (eg the Obama 'stimulus') has risen exponentially, so we're likely looking at ten Manhattan Projects now.
A good chunk of that spending has, of course, gone towards "educating" the public.
This "education" takes many forms: from blatant propaganda, like the UK government's £6 million "drowning puppy" ad campaign, the Obama administration's recent Climate Assessment Report and the one released by a group of compliant senior US military figures calling themselves CNA Military Advisory Board, to more subtle brainwashing ranging from school trips to wind farms and ice cream containers with pictures of wind farms on the side and oil company adverts illustrated with wind farms (to show they're not just "all about oil") to, well, pretty much everything these days from supermarket delivery vehicles boasting about how much biofuel they use to Greenpeace campaign ads involving polar bears to Roger Harrabin's reporting for the BBC to Showtime's Years Of Living Dangerously....
I happen to be writing this in a rather attractive hotel room disfigured by signs everywhere about how the hotel is "committed" to "going green" and "saving the planet" by not changing my sheets and towels unless I arrange them in a designated fashion in the bathtub (presumably the internationally agreed symbol for a towel-change denialist, and possibly on page 734 of the Kyoto Treaty).
And yet, as James says, no one's interested. The numbers of people seriously worried about "climate change" are as flat as the handle of Mann's hockey stick, and the numbers who are worried enough to do anything more about it than suffer the same smelly, damp towel for their fortnight's vacation are even smaller.
The way to get those numbers up is through persuasion and argument, and seeking common ground with partial allies. Instead, the cultists demand 100 per cent ideological purity, and blacklist, sue or call for the imprisonment and execution of anyone who fails the test. You can bully Lennart Bengtsson, you can sue me, maybe one day you'll be able to jail and hang us. But you'll be as far away as ever from persuading the millions of ordinary citizens desensitized by two decades of shrieking hysteria.
Michael E Mann, liar, cheat, falsifier and fraud, is at the very center of this ever more witless thuggery. I'd been saving this Shakespearean headline for an upcoming piece on the fake Nobel Laureate, but The Prussian beat me to it: "What A Piece Of Work Is Mann." It's well worth a read, not least for its at-a-glance guide to some of the many versions of Mann's "hockey stick"*. But, as a scientist who thinks that anthropogenic global warming is real, The Prussian is less concerned with Mann's science (which seems to take up very little of his time) than with his general conduct:
This behaviour isn't that of someone trying to gain rational agreement but of one enforcing a faith-based creed.
I'm really, really not surprised that there's so much denialism around, if this is the public face of climate science...
There's no such thing as specific censorship. You can't just hold down one thing, you always end up holding down the things next to it. If you, for example:
- Accept that global warming is real, but disagree about its extent, or
- Agree about the extent, but disagree about the rate, or
- Agree about the rate and the extent, but disagree about the effects or
- Agree about the rate, extent and effects, but disagree about how to deal with it, or
- Agree about all the foregoing, but disagree how to get those solutions done…
Mann's goonshow tactics will be trained on you. Why do I say that? For the simple reason that that is what is already happening. We will need the best ideas we can get to deal with this issue, and the only way to get those is to have the freest possible marketplace of ideas.
But in the marketplace of ideas Mann's idea is to sue you, and Suzuki's idea is to jail you, and Parncutt's idea is to execute you.
As for the latest goonshow hockey-sticking, Dr Judith Curry put it to him very directly on Twitter:
.@MichaelEMann Were you one of the U.S. scientists that pressured Bengtsson to resign from the GWPF?
Dr Mann seems to be in no hurry to respond.
~We're currently preparing to move to the trial phase of Mann vs Steyn, and deep in the weeds of a rigorous investigation of Mann. That's not cheap, so, if you would like to support the endeavor via the SteynOnline bookstore or by buying one of our SteynOnline gift certificates, I'd be very pleased.
*This seems as good a place as any to mention that, re my over-generalization that "the hockey stick has a 900-year-long shaft that is almost entirely proxy temperatures and a 20th century blade that is almost entirely observed temperatures", Steve McIntyre has written to point out that "the proxy portion of the MBH98 reconstruction is made up of proxies until 1980. There are some proxies that go up in the 20th century e.g. bristlecones, Yamal, and these proxies are used over and over in the supposedly 'independent' studies." I stand corrected.
