Meet the Climate Realists
Though climate alarmists never tire of demonizing greenhouse gases and “fossil” fuels, hell has no fury equal to the venom they reserve for those maligned as “climate deniers.” “This is treason, and we need to start treating them as traitors,” spat environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the 2007 Live Earth Concert at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. NASA’s James Hansen testified before a congressional committee in 2008 that “CEO’s of fossil energy companies … should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” A 2009 Talking Points Memo article reached bloodthirsty pitch by asking, “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?” Earlier, in 2006, the environmental news magazine Grist wrote that “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
The smear campaign involves more than mudslinging and threats. In a May Washington Post op-ed, Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island called on the Obama administration to investigate and prosecute the “climate denial network” under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). More recently, New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, ordered an investigation of whether Exxon Mobil has lied to the public and investors about its contribution to global warming. The French government fired its chief meteorologist, Philippe Verdier, after the October release of his book, Climat Investigation, in which he criticizes alarmists in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for having “taken the world hostage” with misleading and erroneous data.
Likewise, the states of Delaware, Oregon, and Virginia have each muzzled their official climatologists for failing to toe the party line, according to a U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee press release. Patrick Michaels, who holds a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, declared, “I resigned as Virginia state climatologist because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise — global warming — as state climatologist. It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction.”
Pundits warn that climate-change skeptics and those who support them will face more political and legal reprisals in the near future. They have reason for concern. As executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer announced that those who ignore the urgency of global warming are “nothing less than criminally irresponsible.” And in November Secretary of State John Kerry censured those he claims “put us all at risk” by questioning climate change politics when he said that “we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that.”
At the heart of the debate is the unsubstantiated claim that humans have transformed a harmless, life-sustaining gas that currently makes up about 0.04 percent of Earth’s atmosphere into a life-threatening pollutant by raising its concentration by around 33 percent over the course of the last century. World-renowned organizations such as the IPCC, NASA, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and even the Vatican say we can, though they lack verifying data, or evidence that such a change would be harmful in any way. Their proof amounts to a supposed 97-percent consensus among climate scientists that humans are destroying the planet with their unquenchable thirst for fossil fuels. This bandwagon fallacy has prompted President Barack Obama to declare the debate “settled” and human-caused climate change to be “a fact” — and to ignore the Constitution, bypass Congress, and enact costly bureaucratic regulations aimed at averting catastrophe.
Who could object to such stamps of authority? You can find a catalog of them at BarackObama.com, where visitors pick their most hated “deniers” and “call them out” by sending an e-mail invoking the 97-percent appeal and tweeting their friends to do the same — a high-tech peer-pressure maneuver. The irony is that many of those climate offenders made the list when they realized Obama & Associates base their 97-percent statistic on a lone 2013 article published in the science journal Environmental Research Letters: “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming [AGW] in the scientific literature.” The authors did indeed find a 97.1-percent consensus that humans are causing global warming, but only among the remarkably few papers that expressed a position on the subject. (Most of the reviewed literature didn’t.) William Jasper explains at TheNewAmerican.com that “only 65 (yes, 65) of the 12,000+ scientific abstracts” included in the study “can be said to endorse the position that human activity is responsible” for AGW. You disagree that one-half of one percent equals 97 percent? If so, you may be a climate denier, too!
But lest you fear to have joined a radical, lunatic three-percent fringe group, The New American has compiled a short sampling of the tens of thousands of rational and reputable scientists who maintain an unbiased skepticism toward AGW, even at the risk of acquiring the career-jeopardizing slur of “denier.” Meet some climate realists: Click below…
Source: Meet the Climate Realists