A thought experiment. You’re a jury member in a courtroom trial that will decide whether the defendant – man-made global warming advocacy – is, as it claims to be, a disinterested conduit of scientific truth, or, as the prosecutor will argue, guilty of perpetrating “the most powerful myth in human history” in the service of global political transformation.
Empanelled on the basis of your objectivity and high intelligence, you feel out of your cognitive depth. You’re not a scientist, just an open-minded, engaged citizen. This bothers you.
You’ve already heard the defense attorney’s spiel (in this courtroom the order of go is reversed). It’s a reprise of everything you’ve read in the media for the past twenty years. You realize you’re biased in the defendant’s favor, because so many authoritative figures publicly support it, and politicians of all stripes kowtow to them. So you’re scrupulously attentive to the prosecution’s case.
Thanks for participating. The hypothetical jury member is most laypeople, including me. The hypothetical courtroom is a newly published book, Global Warning, Trials of an Unsettled Science; and the prosecutor is its author, David Solway, a familiar name to regular readers of PJ Media.
Solway is a prolific creative and critical supernova: poet, (retired) college literature teacher, educational theorist, travel writer, producer, scriptwriter, musician/singer, and the recipient of numerous prizes, not to mention one of Canada’s most insightful literary critics.
All this, and – for the last decade, since 9/11 jolted him out of the default leftism he’d imbibed as a student in the 1960s – an impassioned polemicist on the political right.
In his latest books and journalism, Solway has made a specialty of comprehensive investigation into the depredations inflicted on the West by intellectual corruption on the Left. His capacious appetite for research, harnessed to his trademark, corrosively brilliant rhetoric, would have made him a redoubtable courtroom prosecutor indeed.
In Global Warning Solway walks us through emergent scientific holes in the global-warming paradigm, in reader-friendly accounts that are informative and persuasive. Solway has clearly immersed himself in the literature on the subject. Nevertheless, the fact that he is a layman leaves him open to detractors’ charge that he lacks the authority to challenge reigning orthodoxies.
Which is why I believe the principal value of this book lies in its revelations of the disturbing lengths to which advocates of man-made global warming will go to suppress inquiry into the “settled science” by resistant scientists and laypeople alike. One doesn’t need any special scientific background to wonder why this subject, so massively freighted by financial, political, and personal-freedoms implications, “has been commandeered by an army of political pulpiteers whose underlying purposes are distressingly suspect.” Here Solway is on firm moral and intellectual ground.
What will especially raise readers’ ethical hackles are his disclosures of duplicity at what should be the most credible institutional levels in ensuring that counter-claims to the received wisdom are suppressed.
For a particularly egregious example of bad faith in communicating with the public, Solway cites a 2009 University of Illinois survey concluding that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. But the methodology of the survey was grossly corrupt. Of the 10,257 respondents, 10,180 demurred from the consensus. They were summarily rejected, even though included amongst them were solar scientists, meteorologists, physicists, and other scientific experts. Seventy-five of the remaining 77 respondents agreed with the proposition that global warming is caused by humans and voilà! That equals 97.4%. In fact, only .008% of the respondents concurred with the hypothesis. This is intellectual fraud of breathtaking arrogance, yet it is only one of a slew of truth-traducing offenses Solway has amassed.
How do academics and other global-warming stakeholders justify their complicity in manufacturing consent? Solway explains it as a form of cognitive dissonance of the type one often finds in religions and triumphalist ideologies, where ends are privileged over means. In his chapter on environmentalism as religion, Solway explains how Gaia, the earth’s divine avatar, replaced God in our secular age.
Environmentalism has been transmogrified from a wholesome movement to make the earth a healthier and cleaner habitat for human beings into an antihumanist, eco-worshipping cult, where man’s footprint anywhere at all is perceived as inherently toxic.
Indeed, some influential environmentalists actively promote the atrophy of humanity so that the earth can return to a pristine natural state. David Graber, a National Park Service biologist writes, “Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” David Foreman, leader of Earth First!, says that “it may well take our extinction to set things straight.” Paul Watson, Greenpeace’s co-founder and head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, calls human beings “the AIDS of the Earth.” Where is the outrage at such moral inversion? Not in the mainstream media, that’s for sure.
Consecrated to their dual messianic vision of global “social justice” and eco-atavism, the high priests of environmentalism whip up hysteria about man-made global warming as a strategic weapon to chill apostate discourse. Their obsession, unchecked by responsible journalism, emboldens them.
In Solway’s environmental Rogues’ Gallery, you meet heavyweights like Canadian fruit fly specialist and enviro-guru David Suzuki arguing that politicians who fail to act on environmental issues should be thrown into jail, and British lawyer Polly Higgins petitioning the United Nations to declare “ecocide” a punishable crime and prosecute “climate deniers.” You have Steve Zwick of Forbes magazine recently writing: “We know who the active denialists are….Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn…”.
These and many more. But the George Orwell award goes to the UK utility Npower, which initiated a promotional campaign in which children can apply for a “free climate cops challenge diary” to record their parents’ “climate crimes.”
Such alarming manifestations of political pathology throw a harsh light on the “Climatocracy’s” totalitarian mindset toward “carbon chastity.” They have not, thankfully, gone unchallenged by reasonable minds, and Solway proffers some heartening examples of brusque rational pushback. Czech president Vaclav Klaus warns: “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom… in ambitious environmentalism…”; and in his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg says that “environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist.”
Solway is lucky to have found a conservative Canadian publisher. (Full disclosure: Solway’s publisher, Freedom Press [Canada], has published one of my books and will soon publish another). Unequivocal challengers of enviro-correctness are often considered conspiracy theorists or worse in Canada, where Big Government and Big Solutions are not only tolerated, but the norm, and where Solway’s Swiftian brand of saevo indignatio would be a turnoff to mainstream publishers targeting a wide swathe of “polite” Canadians.
Too much is at stake here to mince words. What is needed, if disinterested science is to prevail, is less politeness and more forthrightness. The jury is in on this gem of a book, readable in a sitting. It’s good, and worthy of wide distribution.
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