“Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reasoning are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England 20 years before the American Revolution,” no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning past fear.” …. “Facts no longer matter. We simply decide how we want to see the world and then go out and find experts and evidence to back our beliefs.” (WUWT)
The above cartoon notes this recent story (h/t to Climate Depot) from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Democrat Senator (RI) Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch if there “are there other circumstances in which a civil matter under the authority of the Department of Justice has been referred to the FBI?”To which the AG responded,
This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” Lynch answered. “I’m not aware of a civil referral at this time.
In a poll of 1,000 likely voters, Rasmussen Reports asked if the “government [should] investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” A full 27% of Democrats replied in the affirmative, as did 12% of Republicans. (Breitbart)
This is an update to my very frightening post about where Democrats are headed in this country. And that is, where every other leftist government has ventured into… fascism. Except this time, it is “eco-fascism.”
More in this UPDATE from IBD (hat-tip to GAYPATRIOT):
Conform or else. That’s the message of the global warming alarmists. Those who don’t buy into the man-made climate change narrative should be prosecuted as criminals.
“Put officials who reject science in jail,” someone named Brad Johnson who says he’s executive director of something called Climate Hawks Vote tweeted last month.
At roughly the same time, Mark Hertsgaard typed a screed in The Nation which ran under the headline:
“Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us: The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer — and it’s not the storm.”
“How long,” Hertsgaard asked, “before we hold the ultimate authors of such climate catastrophes accountable for the miseries they inflict?”
And then there’s Bill Nye, the Junk Science Guy, who hasn’t been able to cover up his apparent desire to see “criminal investigations” against those ignoring his truth. It’s not hard to see through him, though. He dissembles like a politician but his appetite is clear.
The urge to prosecute and imprison those who don’t believe as they have been commanded to is not a new wrinkle among the alarmist tribe. Three years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sounding like, well, a Kennedy, said the Koch brothers “should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals.”
“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it.”
The Kochs’ crime? Selling energy resources to willing buyers and funding organizations that have reservations about the climate change story we’re constantly being told……..
AL GORE
…For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to “punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting ‘accepted science,’” said the Chicago Tribune.
Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. “We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”…
Climate commie Bill Nye the Pseudo-Science Guy has joined the ranks of totalitarians who want skeptics of the floundering global warming hoax imprisoned…
[….]
Science? This isn’t about science. Global warming, climate change, climate chaos, or whatever they call the hoax next week is about hard left authoritarian politics. The Bill Nye–level pseudo-science is strictly window dressing.
Meanwhile, there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 23 years despite rising levels of beneficial CO2, shedding light on why warmists have been resorting to coercion to prop up their hoax.
Various Democrats
Also note that Democrats are actively investigations into people who counter the anthropogenic global warming narrative:
Dem Congressman “sent requests to seven universities asking for detailed records on the funding sources for affiliated researchers who have opposed the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.”
Harassment prompts scientist to stop his research debunking extreme weather claims – CU Climate Expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: I am Under ‘Investigation’ – Accuses Dems of ‘a politically-motivated ‘witch hunt’ designed to intimidate me (and others) and to smear my name”
As The Post’s Joby Warrick reported earlier this week, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D- Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, asked seven universities for detailed records on the funding sources for seven scientists, many of whom are unconvinced that humans are the driving force behind recent climate change.
In a letter to Grijalva released this afternoon, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) — a scientific and professional society representing atmospheric and oceanic scientists — expressed strong opposition to the inquiry.
“Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources — and thereby questioning their scientific integrity — sends a chilling message to all academic researchers,” the AMS wrote.
The AMS joins a cast of individual scientists who have spoken out against the inquiry…
Democrats may be flustered after a week of being accused of engineering an anti-science “witch hunt,” but they aren’t backing down from their investigations into the financial backing of climate change researchers who challenge the movement’s doomsday scenarios.
Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told National Journal this week that he may have been guilty of overreach even as he defended his probe into the funding sources of seven professors, now known as the “Grijalva Seven.”
Three Senate Democrats — Barbara Boxer of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — are conducting their own probe of 100 fossil fuel companies and trade associations funding climate research….
Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI): ‘In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise…The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.”
….That’s right — a sitting U.S. Senator is suggesting using RICO laws should be applied to global warming skeptics. Courts have been defining RICO down for some time and in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled RICO statutes could be applied to pro-life activists on the grounds that interstate commerce can be affected even when the organization being targeted doesn’t have economic motives.
Obviously, there’s a lot of money hanging in the balance with regard to energy policy. But when does coordinating “a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts” go from basic First Amendment expression to racketeering? The tobacco analogy is inappropriate in regards to how direct the link between smoking and cancer is. Even among those who do agree that global warming is a problem, there’s a tremendously wide variety of opinions about the practical effects. Who gets to decide whether someone is “downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change” relative to the consensus? If message coordination and lobbying on controversial scientific and political issues can be declared racketeering because the people funding such efforts have a financial interest in a predetermined outcome, we’re just going to have to outlaw everything that goes on in Washington, D.C.
…it’s the global warming scientists who are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. Hollywood – he’s the climatologists to the stars. It’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists are on the pay like tobacco companies. It’s the height of arrogance when you look at the actual data, the global warming scientists, through government grants, foundations, through media empowerment, have the full advantages of government money, foundation money, university money. There’s not even any comparison.’
Green News also notes proposed “jailing” of “deniers:
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has a new plan to combat climate change: sue fossil fuel companies for fraud. In a May 29 op-ed in The Washington Post , Whitehouse argued that the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to discredit climate science and attack environmentalists may constitute deliberate deception of the kind the tobacco industry perpetrated in previous decades. In 2006, a federal judge found the tobacco industry guilty of fraud in a civil lawsuit brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Cigarette companies’ efforts to hide the health effects of tobacco consumption included lying about the findings of…
A not so surprising thing happened as they do at all large Democratic gatherings, a whole bunch of trash was left behind. Continuing with Breitbart:
This week in New York City somewhere around 400,000 litterbugs descended on the Big Apple, and not to celebrate the wonderful news that the planet hasn’t warmed in 18 years. Instead they gathered to do, uhm, whatever this is , and to pretend Global Warming is real and dire, so that those pushing this phony crisis can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives. (Breitbart)
John Kerry is blaming future calamities on those of us who deny the Left’s main contention that man-made CO2 is the main driver behind our planet’s weather system. Here is the WaPo article via Climate Depot:
…Kerry noted that he was speaking in Hampton Roads, where the land the city is built on is sinking as sea levels are rising twice as fast as the world’s average. He said political opponents who doubt the science of climate change are posing a threat to everyone.
“The science tells us unequivocally, those who continue to make climate change a political fight put us all at risk,” he said. “And we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that.”
Kerry called climate change more than a threat to the habitats of butterflies and polar bears. He said it has a direct impact on military readiness…
Various DEMOCRAT Leaning Person’s
….In 2009, New York Times Paul Krugman accused Congressmen who voted against climate cap-and-trade bill of ‘treason against the planet!’
‘Execute’ Skeptics! Krugman’s sentiment joined by fellow climate fear promoters
In June 2009, a public appeal was issued on 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.
After all the attention drawn to it by Climate Depot, the Talking Points Memo article was later pulled and the website published a retraction and apology, but the sentiment was stark and unequivocal and has significant company among climate fear promoters.
Romm, a former Clinton Administration official, pulled the comments after Climate Depot drew attention to them. “The original was clearly not a threat but a prediction — albeit one that I certainly do not agree with. Since some people misread it, I am editing it,” Romm wrote.
Small sampling of threats, intimidation and censorship:
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.
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.
Professor Lawrence Torcello
This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.
Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.
Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.
What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?
DAVID SUZUKI
Here is David Suzuki calling for jail, and the PBS host more worried that there isn’t enough space [yet?] for us to be jailed:
David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.
At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month….
Suzuki: “I really believe that people like the former Prime Minister of Canada should be thrown in jail for willful blindness. If you’re the CEO of a company and you deliberately avoid or ignore information relevant to the functioning of that company, you can be thrown in jail… And to have a Prime Minister who for nine years wouldn’t even let the term ‘climate change’ pass his lips! If that isn’t willful blindness, then I don’t know what is.”
Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:
In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…
…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.
If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”
So…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?
By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?
Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…
In a recent article, 20-leading scientists have come out to recommend legal action (jail) for those of us who use science to counter AGW types:
Twenty climate scientists called for RICO investigation in a letter to Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The scientists argue that the systemic efforts to prevent the public from understanding climate change resembles the investigation undertaken against tobacco. They draw inspiration from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse who said on the Senate floor that there might be a similar conspiracy here, and a civil trial could provide the tools of discovery needed to find out.
[….]
[Note: This call for treating skeptics as racketeers comes the same week that the New York Times promoted equating climate skeptics to Hitler. See: The Next Genocide – NYT OpEd: Climate “deniers” present “intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s”….
One law professor is calling for the World Court to “rule on climate science to quash skeptics” ~ leading one writer to say:
If this thinks that the World Court or any other court is remotely qualified to “settle the scientific dispute,” he is a total fracking moron advocating a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the trial of Galileo. (WUWT)