More disreputable climate alarmism from the ivy league

Meet Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale and wacko climate alarmist. Just how wacko?  He blithely compares critics of climate panic to Nazi Einsatzgruppe commanders. Yes, really. Here’s how he starts a recent Op-Ed in our former paper of  record. “Before he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, ‘You must die so that we can live.’ . . . The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas,  . . .”

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Gosh.  Godwin’s Law holds that if an online discussion goes on long enough, someone will invoke Hitler or the Nazis and thereby lose the argument. Yale Professor Synder does not wait around: he jumps right in screaming: “The Next Genocide.” An editor at a major, formerly responsible, newspaper actually let this silly headline see the light of day. And listen to this: “The full consequences of climate change,” intones Yale history Professor Synder, “may reach America only decades after warming wreaks havoc in  other regions. And by then it will be too late for climate science and energy technology to make any difference.” The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

It’s long been clear that environmentalism is the new religion for leftists.  You can never be Green enough, comrade, and the ideology of climate change provides an unending rationale for economic redistribution.  Never mind that if the gibberish Yale history professor Synder spouts were acted on the first casualties would be the world’s poor. The opportunities for moral self-aggrandizement that ecological panic affords are just too attractive to let facts get in the way. Yale history professor Synder pretends that he is speaking up for science against greedy business interests.  But really he is parroting the pseudo-science of cynical operators like Al Gore, who has added tens of millions of dollars to his personal fisc by exploiting government-supported eco-panic and reprehensible boondoggles like Solyndra.

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The Times can countenance no dissent on this issue, so they of course deny articulate critics of Yale History Professor Synder an audience. Bruce Everett, a specialist in energy economics who spent six years at the Department of Energy, has written a devastating rebuttal to Yale history Professor Synder’s drivel. Naturally you won’t find it at the Times.  I am pleased to report, however, that it is available at The New Criterion’s weblog.  Here’s a taste:

Like many climate activists, Professor Snyder sees climate change as an argument between scientists and “certain political and business elites”. In his view, “These deniers tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science—an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.” Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is not a fact, but rather a hypothesis to be tested against observations. In reality, the catastrophic climate hypothesis is based on a series of assumptions about the way the climate system works and is supported neither by theory nor by empirical evidence. Climate activists have predicted for years that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause an alarming rise in temperature, reaching levels later this century that would bring widespread global disruption and misery. Atmospheric temperatures, however, have remained flat for the last 15 years or so. Since the predicted catastrophe has not actually occurred, activists have worked hard to substitute the notion of consensus for that of science. The catastrophic climate hypothesis must be true, they argue, since so many prominent people, both scientists and others, support it. Many scientists with opposing views have been unable to get funding or have simply been intimidated into silence. It’s the climate activists’ view that represents the true denial of science, harking back to the Middle Ages when the Church insisted that all questions be resolved not by empirical evidence but by committees of experts reading scripture, with dissenters burned at the stake. I agree with Professor Snyder that denying science is dangerous for modern societies, but climate activists are on the wrong side of this issue.

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Read the whole thing here.

 

 

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