Hysteria the newest version of witch trials

Thomas Jefferson wrote about global warming. Extensively, in fact, both in relating correspondence from friends in Europe describing the warming and in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781). He described a mild warming trend of the same rate as we saw over the past century, now slowed.

Mr. Jefferson’s chronicle reads like many stories in the press today, if lacking the panic and assignment of blame. Of course, Mr. Jefferson was merely an observer. With no ideological, business or political agenda tied to public acceptance of alarm, he therefore had no interest in renewing past, tragically unhappy scare campaigns of blaming one’s neighbors for an always changing climate.

Those panics of yore remained dormant for more than two centuries, returning in the late 1970s with the claimed “consensus” over catastrophic man-made global cooling. The consensus then was no more real than it is today, but was insisted upon by those who saw greater opportunity in avoiding debate than having it.

This analogy to past climate hysteria and its witch-burnings is not as overstated, as one might imagine.

Settling here in Albemarle County four years ago, I sought to spare my family some degree of the petty harassment greeting all who dare weigh in on the side of “climate skepticism.” In my case, Greenpeace even took my trash each Sunday night, cobbling together unrelated offal-smeared documents which then appeared in “stories” in the Guardian, Independent, El Pais and Deutsche-Welle.

“That’s nothing,” several scientists informed me, telling of their experiences of death threats (Canada’s Dr. Tim Ball) and of wheels serially falling off a car — even once while the

scientist drove his young daughter (Norway’s Dr. Tom Segalstad). Other academics relate professional, as opposed to physical, threats. Still others — even less inclined toward risk-taking — sputtered, for example, “You must be kidding ... I’m up for tenure!” about joining on a legal brief when colleagues and I represented the “skeptic” scientists in a Supreme Court case. Lovely.

My point in detailing such anecdotes, episodes of intimidation and even examples of scientific misconduct remains to present the public with certain questions they largely were not aware even needed to be asked. Such as: Why the tactics? Why such apparent desperation? Why is it that we are told the one thing that is too expensive — indeed, the only thing we cannot afford — is debate? Why the troubling, utilitarian red flag of “we must act now on climate change”?

In short, why must someone make so many things up and be so nasty about it, and is this ever the sign of a movement confident in the facts?

In response, we hear talking points like “the science is settled” and “the debate is over,” with no recollection of having had the debate or assertion of whatever it is that settled the science.

We’re instead told that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represents the world’s leading scientists and they say it’s just so.

Well, no. Here you see the fallacy of the appeal to authority, a rhetorical tool to avoid answering a question or making one’s case. The IPCC boasts on its Web page how it “does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.”

It does assert a “low level of scientific understanding” of dominant factors including the sun and clouds (query: Is it warmer at noon, or midnight; when it’s cloudy, or not?). Yet it proclaims a 90 percent to 95 percent “certainty” that man drives climate.

“Settled,” that isn’t. Whether it is even science I leave to your judgment.

The man touted as the IPCC’s chief “climatologist” (New York Times and USA Today) and its “chief climate scientist” (Associated Press), Rajendra Pachauri, is actually an economist; and the “2,000 world’s leading climate scientists” include anthropology teaching assistants, transport policy instructors and not a few pressure group activists.

Of course, we do not leave this field exclusively to scientists but depend on politicians to attain informed judgment on the issues. Our policymakers, unfortunately, show far more interest in claiming they “did something” than in the science, preferring to declare that “settled” while paradoxically throwing billions of taxpayer dollars more on it each year.

Virginia’s Senate delegation of self-described moderates are key voices as Congress prepares to “do something” remarkably expensive (and unilateral). We must demand they consider observations in their calculus. Cooling in recent years wiped out two decades of warming, which peaked more than a decade ago. Pending legislation is entirely premised instead upon computer model projections, none of which allowed for the past 15 years of no warming. Rather, they reflect the IPCC mysticism that climate simply must be hypersensitive to increases in a trace gas produced overwhelmingly by (non-human) nature.

Indeed, nothing ever proposed would, according to anyone under any scenario or set of assumptions, “do anything.” That is, neither the Kyoto treaty nor Congress’s cap-and-trade scheme would detectably impact climate. Europe’s experiment with cap-and-trade, however, has managed to send European steel jobs to Kentucky and Alabama.

Readers may recall Cyrano de Bergerac who, after typical recklessness left him unable to afford his meal, heard derisive cries of “a stupid act!” To which Cyrano replied with pride and grandiosity, “But what a gesture!”

Congress’ impact-free “global warming” bills are extraordinarily expensive gestures and inherently are not about the climate. Let’s stop the name-calling and nasty tactics, and call on our legislators to reflect a little more Jefferson, and a lot less Cyrano.