Right Back At Ya, “Warmists”

It’s snowing in Alberta in May. Which, of course, proves global warming is happening. Photo: Larry Wong/Canwest News Service

According to the Ottawa Citizen, more than 250 “prominent scientists”, including 11 Nobel laureates, are calling on people to cease personal political attacks and focus on the facts. For a moment, I welcomed the idea of ending the “politicizing” of climate change, and the personal attacks that come with not accepting the gospel of anthropogenic climate change.

And then I realized they didn’t mean an end to all political attacks. Just the ones directed at them.

So the 250 prominent scientists have turned around and called those who disagree with them “deniers”, a loaded term that is associative with those who disbelieve in the historical evidence of a holocaust against the Jews. Delightful company to be in, I’m sure.

“Recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence,” the scientists say in an open letter published the journal Science.

Special interests? What special interests? Who and what are these special interests they’re referring to? Speaking of dogma, using the term “special interests” is like invoking the catch-all bogeyman of rhetorical commentary.

Society, the letter says, has two choices. And only two, apparently. The first is to hide our heads in the sand and ignore that imminent devastation awaits our inaction. The second is to do precisely what they advise us not to do, which is to use guilt trips, distractions, and outright lies in order to encourage political influence to take action.

Two can play at the metaphor game, and if given the choice between the ostrich and chicken little, I’ll take the ostrich every time.

As for the 11 Nobel laureates, well, they’re members of the entire IPCC panel that shared in the 2007 prize with pop culture hero for a day, Al Gore, who has since become a little busy moving into a new mansion. The $8,875,000 gated villa on the beach with 1 1/2 acres, six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and 6,500 square feet of living space, has come from his considerable income in the climate change Armageddon speaking tour racket, and investment in “green” industries that he has used his political clout to get government to subsidize.

You can’t just break the public trust with a scandal like climategate, and then ask for an end to the “politicization” of science by telling the skeptics to shut up and stop being “deniers”. Where I come from, we call that elitism.

No, when you’ve earned the right to be trusted again, we’ll let you know. You could begin by accepting that there is no so-called consensus on climate change being attributable to mankind, that those who are skeptical of the so-called consensus are not deniers, and that the scientific community needs to work harder to provide evidence that the changes in climate are irrefutably linked to airborne hydrocarbon emissions caused by human beings.

Until that happens, right back at ya, “warmists”.