Global Warming Denial’s Twin Brother
January 4, 2014
For a long time now holocaust revisionists, aka “deniers”, have occupied a spot in the public’s esteem somewhere below pedophiles and just above serial killers. Now, a new contender for the penultimate position in the scale of public opprobrium has emerged: global warming “deniers”. The debate-squelching term has been applied to the likes of Richard Lindtzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at MIT; Roger Pielke Sr., professor emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State; and Patrick Michaels, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists. A while back, Scott Pelley of CBS News directly linked the two sets of heretics.
As with holocaust deniers, who enjoyed a brief exposure in the national media in the early 1990s but have since been banned from the airwaves, attempts are being made to deny global warming skeptics access to the podium. The Los Angeles Times recently banned “factually inaccurate” letters to the editor skeptical of human-caused climate change. In November, Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for The Nation, accused Piers Morgan of being “journalistically irresponsible” for allowing a denier, Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, on his (Hertsgaard, who I suspect has a degree in Art History or the like, admonished Dr. Spencer, a former senior climate scientist at NASA, telling him he “needs to read more scientific papers”, to which Dr. Spencer graciously responded “I’ve got a feeling I’ve read more than you have, Mark”.)
Like holocaust denial, global warming denial can be hazardous to your career. In her inaugural address to Department of the Interior staff, the newly-appointed Secretary, Sally Jewell, warned ““I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior” (She’s probably checking the closets right now). Heidi Cullen, host of The Weather Channel’s “The Climate Code”, has called for the American Meteorologist Society to decertify weathermen who express skepticism about human activity causing climate change. And in Oregon, Governor Ted Kulongoski, sought to strip Professor George Taylor of the honorary title “State Climatologist”, bestowed on him by Oregon State, because of his anti-warmist views.
Fortunately, global warming denial has not been criminalized as has holocaust denial in Europe… yet. But RFK Jr. once accused supposed financial backers of global warming denial, like Exxon-Mobil, of treason, and David Suzuki, a well-known Canadian environmentalist, urged his fans to find a way to throw global warming denying politicians in jail because “what they’re doing is a criminal act”. of Grist went ballistic in an op-ed in that online mag, labeling climate change denial a “war crime” worthy of a Nuremberg-type prosecution. Thankfully, we don’t prosecute holocaust deniers in this country, and I think it unlikely their global warming co-defendants will suffer that fate either.
There’s one final similarity between holocaust and global warming deniers: they’re both beginning to win the debate. Success for the global warming skeptics derives from the fact the earth hasn’t warmed in over a decade, something the models didn’t predict. In groping for an explanation, warmists have resorted to arguments very similar to those employed by holocaust believers. For instance, in testimony before Congress recently, David Titley, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in trying to explain the lack of evidence for climate change-induced severe weather, argued “The Absence of Evidence is not the Evidence of Absence”, echoing the holocaust believers’ argument that the absence of any evidence of gas chambers is not evidence that gas chambers never existed. Dedicated and courageous scholars – often writing under pseudonyms for obvious reasons – have debunked the major holocaust myths to my satisfaction. If the Russian archives are ever opened fully, I’m sure the revelations they contain will be sufficient to convince the rest of you.
So, if over the next few years, the mean global temperature fails to rise, arctic sea ice recovers its former extent, severe weather events don’t increase in intensity or frequency, the polar bears continue to thrive (while you’re shedding a tear for the forlorn polar bears drifting towards extinction on their ever-shrinking ice floes, remember the poor penguins, who now have to walk 22 miles further to reach the sea because of the record ice extent in the Antarctic), and you find yourself listening with increased respect to what the global warming deniers have to say, please consider whether those other more venerable, even more denigrated deniers might, too, have something to say worth listening to. In fact, why wait? (a good place to start is The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust)
Ken Meyercord is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice.
Ken Meyercord produces a public access TV show called Worlddocs which “brings the world to the people of the Washington, DC area through documentaries you won’t see broadcast on corporate TV.” He has a Master’s in Middle East History from the American University of Beirut. He can be contacted at .
