OPINION:
If the climate change lobby prevails, anyone unwilling to bow to the extremist environmental orthodoxy won’t be allowed to speak. As the United Nations Climate Change Conference enters its final week in Paris, green groups have a message for scientific skeptics: Shut up and get out. So much for science and free speech in the City of Light.
Making law is always like making sausage. What the delegates from 195 nations are attempting to package in Paris resembles not only sausage, but the stinky cheese for which France is famous. Fearful that their proposed pact to limit greenhouse gases may be unpalatable, activists lash out at anyone in Paris who questions the “science” behind the global warming theory and the United Nations effort to force the engines of world commerce to switch from affordable fossil fuels to weather-dependent natural energy.
The green group called SumOfUs petitioned conference organizers to revoke the credentials of skeptical participants. SumOfUs, pidgin-spelling and all, accuses the “world’s most notorious climate deniers” of insinuating themselves into the proceedings “in a last-minute attempt to derail the whole thing.” Among the accused are scholars from the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, both respected think tanks advocating free markets, rather than government oppression, as the way to a solution. “It’s not appropriate for organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute to be part of the climate talks when their very existence is intended to derail these efforts,” says SumOfUs executive director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which debuted a documentary film on Monday titled “Climate Hustle,” is on the hit list, too. The film features interviews with renowned scientists questioning the research behind the climate scare, and the U.N. pact to attempt to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level.
Street theater has long been a staple of the left, but modern-day greens left home without their sense of humor. Their call to banish ideological opponents is eyes-wide-shut to ideological pettifoggery. “Climate cops” from the activist group Avaaz, plastered “wanted” posters of prominent global warming skeptics on lampposts in the vicinity of the U.N. conference venue, prompting Marc Morano of Climatedepot.com to post a photograph of himself posing proudly next to his “wanted” image. It was a nice likeness.
Despite all the hullabaloo, the Paris conference could not locate the missing link between human-caused emissions and a warming planet. While carbon-dioxide concentrations have continued to rise, global temperatures have remained steady and unaffected for 18 years. Rather than redouble efforts to unlock the secrets of climate cause and effect, the fanatics in charge of “saving the world” have merely proclaimed their goal of de-industrializing the world, facts be damned.
Global warming skeptics represent the inquiring mind the world over. Mother Nature is not to be trifled with, and she dictates that leaders who demand that others follow offer a better reason than “because I said so.” Skepticism is a survival instinct, and the good news is that it’s still in fashion in Paris.
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