Study: Imprisonment for Climate Deniers is Too Blunt and Risky

If the Democrats are elected, you can bet they will enact a law called the Retro-Activity Act, and everything we said here can and will be used against us. It will be our turn someday to be persecuted for freedom of thought.

“The Paris Agreement has failed”. Come and get me.

WE are already a long way down the road the anarchists are determined to take us down.
Their daily prayer, is to destroy capitalism in all its forms and all that it creates. The prime target to achieve that objective is energy reduction. The anarchists, or Green Socialists to use their more identifiable profile, have rightly concluded energy drives capitalism.
Energy and growth is capitalism, they are the two faces of the same coin.
Without energy there can be no growth, from that simple fact, the constantly offended Green socialists (COGS ) have concluded, to destroy capitalism and return the world to muscle power and serfdom, energy production systems must be destroyed. I use the word “destroyed” precisely because that is what is happening all around us. Here in the UK the COGS have agitated through their institutional controls, to block all nuclear development. They have demanded the closure of existing nuclear power plants based on the most contrived logic/reasons, even using a natural event such as a tsunami in Japan, as a valid reason for closing all nuclear power plants in Germany!?
The past generations of coal fired power plants are prime targets, they are not just closed, they are actively destroyed. Here in the UK, we are now down to just four operational coal fired power plants. They are increasingly sidelined, not allowed to input to the grid other than is exceptional demand situations, i.e. when the gas plants have maxed out and the wind doesn’t blow. The abandoned coal generating sites are literally being blown up. They will never to be available again no turbine hall, no cooling towers, zero infrastructure left. All done as fast as the local authority driven by the COGS can make it happen. Like some monument to a past age, the tearing down of our strengths are welcomed by the “Woke folk, they see it as progress. For them it is, it is progress to a darker place literally a darker world.
We have to find the resolve and the route, to return the world to a more sane inclusive mindset. The ongoing left wing takeover of the controls of all factors of production must be challenged and stopped. The left’s hijacking of democratic process, through their local authority committee involvement, through their one sided legislation enactments, through their media controls, both mainstream and social, they all needs to be identified and re-balanced. We must allow true freedom of innovative potential to exist. Without that freedom we are always heading backwards into darker times. Consider this. The anarchists have a day every year, where they celebrate, calling it Earth day, by turning out the lights across the world. They could not make it much clearer what their goals are, could they?
Perhaps the COGS can enlighten us? Perhaps they can tell us where the wind turbines will be coming from in 20 years time when the current fleets have exhausted themselves? The present production is from a fossil fuelled world assisted by nuclear power. In 20 years time there will be no reliable power available to the western world.
Has the decision already been made to rely entirely on the developing world for our security and well-being? If that is the case, than I am grateful I have lived in the world I have. I wish the next generation good luck, because they will need all the good wishes they can get. They won’t be getting much else.

‘There is a negligible amount of literature about climate alarmism …’.

The mother of all selection biases.

Everyone is complaining about the idea that climate sceptics ought to be imprisoned.

This is not the problem. The problem is a wider one – it is that the fact that people can have these ideas without them being instantly rejected as deeply at odds with our culture which is the problem. You will see that it is not only ‘climate change’ which suffers here from this odd extremism – discussions on equality, feminism and much more are equally affected. It is as if the ground has been cut away from under our normal approach to social discussion – the rules that our culture had built up over many years have been abandoned, and nothing but savagery has taken their place.

This is NOT a scientific problem, nor even a political problem. It is a CULTURAL problem. Science, democracy, business and many other aspects of our lives flourish in a western liberal culture which has been developed from its origins in Ancient Greece. This is a primary reason why the Western mode of living has been so successful, and why other cultures around the world have taken it on board.

And for many years now it has been under attack. Typical readers of WUWT have a technological bent, and are quite uninterested in what people like Derrida and post-modernists like Alun Munslow have been saying since the 1980s. Indeed, they are unlikely to understand it, and reject it as rubbish , as with the Sokal Affair. Much of it is. But even rubbish – perhaps especially rubbish – can be VERY damaging if you come to believe in it. C.S Lewis made the point succinctly when he noted:

” Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes…”

The fight against this darkness needs to be led by the Philosophers. That is where the field of battle needs to be waged. Scientists and Engineers will have very little to do with it. They depended on an underlying culture, which has let them down…

Peaceful discourse is infinitely preferable to v!olent revolution.

These PHD-tards do not seem to understand that they may well be the first to go, when the ‘uneducated’ finally have had enough of their shenanigans.

The latest Scientific American (July, 2020) has 2 essays which are fiercely against climate change skeptics.

1. “Are Tech Firms Antiscience?”.
“On April 1 Internet readers were treated to an announcement that
appeared to come from Google CEO Sundar Pichai: “Today Google
Stops Funding Climate Change Deniers.” It explained that Google—
the world’s preeminent information company—had for many
years financed disinformation, but the COVID-
19 crisis had made
it take stock. Google executives would “stop our funding of organizations
that deny or work to block action on climate change.”
The Twittersphere lit up as scientists and environmentalists
praised the corporate giant for offering the private-sector leadership
that has for the most part been missing on this issue. The
Web site A Greener Google, where the announcement was published,
received more than 100,000 hits, and at least one major
news outlet—MarketWatch—reported the story.
Sadly, it was just an April Fools’ Day joke staged by the activist
group Extinction Rebellion, intended to expose the hypocrisy
of companies that boast of green initiatives while supporting
institutions that deny or downplay climate science. It was
plausible in part because last year more than 1,000 Google
employees asked their employer to stop funding these organizations,
as have workers at Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
Like all good satire, it addressed a real problem. In the past
decade Google has contributed to more than a dozen groups that
have worked to prevent action on climate change by promoting
half-truths, misrepresentations and, sometimes, outright lies about
climate research and scientists. These include the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Texas Public Policy Foundation and
the Cato Institute, all of which have a long paper trail of skepticism,
if not outright hostility, toward climate science. CEI has
been directly involved in personal attacks on scientists.
So why do large companies fund organizations that attack science?
Nearly all leading corporations are part of trade groups that
lobby for “pro-business” positions, such as lower taxes, and they
typically turn a blind eye to these groups’ other activities. Microsoft,
for example, participated for years in the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC), which describes itself as dedicated to
“limited government, free markets and federalism.” In 2011 it was
revealed that ALEC had lobbied not only for pro-business initiatives
but also for antidemocratic ones, such as restrictive voter ID
requirements. Over the next few years a bevy of Fortune 500 companies,
Microsoft included, began to withdraw support.
Since the New Deal, trade groups have tried to defend the prerogatives
of the private sector by claiming that the federal government
is a threat to freedom. In the 1980s and 1990s this transmogrified
into an attack on science. As Erik Conway and I showed
in our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, trade groups and libertarian
think tanks resisted the findings on issues such as acid rain,
the hole in the ozone layer, indiscriminate pesticide use and, above
all, anthropogenic climate change—because these were problems
that business created and that government was needed to fix. They
denied reality to protect their ideology and economic interests.
We saw this on full display in recent months as many American
conservatives refused to accept a significant role for government
in containing the coronavirus pandemic. An extreme case is
the governor of South Dakota. Even as COVID-
19 reached her state
and hundreds of workers became ill at a meat-packing plant, she
refused to implement any form of state control. To be sure, stayat-
home orders do decrease personal freedom and hurt the economy.
But governments that took early steps to contain the threat
have done far better in protecting both personal liberty and their
economies. In any case, “freedom” is an empty concept to the dead.
Sam Peinado of Extinction Rebellion told me in an e-mail that
many Google employees thought the April Fools’ announcement
was real because it was “what they expected from their company.”
And why not? Why shouldn’t employees and customers expect corporate
leaders in all sectors to disassociate themselves from organizations
whose rigid ideologies and pursuit of self-interest have
led us into an antiscientific dead end? COVID-19 has proved that
denying science protects neither individuals nor the economy. It’s
time for corporate leaders to step up to the plate and reject the
rejection of science.”

2. “Denial du Jour”
Galileo could be, let’s say, prickly. “Look, he was a genius, and
he was a truly unusual person, but he wasn’t exactly nice,” astrophysicist
and author Mario Livio, whose latest book is Galileo
and the Science Deniers, said by phone. “He was nice to his family,
he supported the members of his family . . . and he had a few
extremely good friends. But he could be nasty to his enemies.
His sharp pen was just incredible.”
The great man shared his lifetime with many people whose
understanding, if you can call it that, of the laws of nature was
strongly influenced by antiquity’s often wrong writers. (You also
share your stay on Earth with such individuals.) One such contemporary
was a Jesuit priest and scientist named Orazio Grassi,
who was known to mix it up in print with Galileo on numerous
occasions.
Galileo really didn’t like this guy. When he read a Grassi lecture
about comets, he wrote margin notes that included pezzo
d’asinaccio (“piece of utter stupidity”), bufolaccio (“buffoon”)
and balordone (“bumbling idiot”). I include the original Italian
because, hey, don’t be a jadrool.
In another work, Grassi, in theorizing about heat, relied
on those ancient authors when he claimed that Babylonians
could cook eggs by whirling them around at the ends of
slings. Livio writes that “Galileo pounced on this fallacy
like a cat on a slow mouse.” Galileo’s retort, written with
that aforementioned sharp pen in a work called The Assayer,
translates to: “If we do not achieve an effect which others
formerly achieved, it must be that we lack something
in our operation which was the cause of this effect succeeding,
and if we lack one thing only, then this alone can be
the true cause.”
The ball thus teed up, Galileo swings away: “Now we do
not lack eggs, or slings, or sturdy fellows to whirl them, and
still [the eggs] do not cook, but rather cool down faster if
hot. And since we lack nothing except being Babylonian,
then being Babylonian is the cause of the egg hardening.”
You could say this reductio ad absurdum left Grassi shelled.
“The more I thought about Galileo and his personality
and his fights,” Livio told me, “I realized how relevant his
fight for intellectual freedom and against science deniers
is for today, when we are really facing rampant science
denial on many fronts.”
Current investigators don’t typically have to face the
possibility of torture, as Galileo did from the Catholic
Church for being “vehemently suspect of heresy.” But modern
climate researchers, evolutionary biologists and educators
are threatened via e-mail and pilloried in social
media, sometimes by elected officials.
In 2012 two conservative outlets charged usually respected
Penn State climatologist Michael E. Mann with disseminating
fraudulent data (and compared him to a pedophile). Mann sued
for defamation, and the case is still unresolved. Worse than the
personal attacks, of course, is that policy is being made based on
nonsense and magical thinking. (I’m writing this in early May.
Has the coronavirus just, poof, gone away yet?)
It’s an almost comical irony that today’s deniers try to assume
the mantle of Galileo: people who disagree with the scientific
consensus on things such as climate sometimes cite Galileo as a
rebel (you know, like themselves) who is now seen as a hero.
“It’s really a logical fallacy,” Livio said. “Oh, look, here was one
who was going against the mainstream, and it turned out to be
right; therefore, those few who speak against climate change are
right. Galileo was right not because he was one against many—
he was right because he was right.”
By this point Livio was laughing: “It’s not the case now every
time that one speaks against the mainstream, he or she is right.
Most of the time those people are wrong. In some rare cases, they
are right. So to bring that as an argument is just ridiculous.” Sadly,
two arguments of very different weights can still convince a
lot of people at the same rate.”