Slime and Punishment – How AGW believers have made their own Faustian Bargain

A lot of us look at the actions of climate change alarmists and wonder how what would seem to be educated people can justify their own actions given the way they sometimes behave. Personally, I often wonder if they aren’t just so off-the-rails that they end up becoming like the “crazy cat lady of climate” in Australia who spends most of her waking hours digging in her own virtual cat litter for nuggets to expound upon, to prove that somehow “climate deniers” are bad and that climate alarmists are good.

Dr. Judith curry has an interesting post about the editor of Science, she writes:

Here is a clear-cut example of advocacy by a scientist, Marcia McNutt, who also happens to be the Chief Editor of Science: The beyond-two-degree inferno.  Read the whole thing, its only about 600 words. I cite here the passages that I particularly want to comment on:

The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently announced that current commitments to cut CO2 emissions [known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] from the world’s nations are insufficient to avoid warming the entire planet by an average of more than 2°C above the preindustrial level. To set more aggressive targets, developed nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further, and by doing so, create roadmaps for developing nations to leapfrog technologies by installing low-CO2–emitting energy infrastructure rather than coal-fired power plants as they expand their energy capacity.

I applaud the forthright climate statement of Pope Francis, currently our most visible champion for mitigating climate change, and lament the vacuum in political leadership in the United States. This is not the time to wait for political champions to emerge. Just as California has decided to go it alone, every sector (transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, etc.) and every person need to do whatever is possible to reduce carbon pollution by conserving energy, adopting alternative energy technologies, investing in research, and capturing CO2 at the source.

In Dante’s Inferno, he describes the nine circles of Hell, each dedicated to different sorts of sinners, with the outermost being occupied by those who didn’t know any better, and the innermost reserved for the most treacherous offenders. I wonder where in the nine circles Dante would place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth in the name of economic growth, accumulating an environmental debt by burning fossil fuels, the consequences of which will be left for our children and grandchildren to bear? Let’s act now, to save the next generations from the consequences of the beyond-two-degree inferno.

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Re the Dante Inferno allegory. Digging In the Clay has an interesting and entertaining post Climate Scientists Road to Hell:

But there is another road to hell for climate scientists and editors of journals and professional societies, that involves

1. Appeal to authority
2. Absence of doubt
3. Intolerance of debate
4. A desire to convince others of the ideological  ‘truth’
5. A willingness to punish those that don’t concur

That last bit is something I have to deal with; it happens mainly because WUWT is so successful and reaches far more people [than] most of the alarmist blogs out there. I and others who dare to question the “consensus” get the “slime and punishment” every day. I wear it as a badge of honor, because if WUWT wasn’t effective, they wouldn’t bother.

As far as the way they use the knowledge they have (that they feel superior about) goes, I’d say that alarmists are “model” citizens, all. It reminds me of a Faustian bargain, whereby Faust traded his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.