Smug Alert

It is a remarkable irony of history that when the leading voices of the radical environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s occupy governmental power in most western nations, their political and international influence is on the wane.

And even the Washington Post, which has done its part to hide, or at least minimize the decline can see it:

Besides ClimateGate of course, at the Daily Beast, liberal historian Thaddeus Russell adds, “Blame the Smug Climate Warriors”:

Those of us who believe the globe has warmed and that it was caused at least in part by human beings have reason to fear the growing movement that dismisses global warming as a hoax. But we should also fear many of those who have convinced us that the problem is real.

The “deniers” are dangerously absolute in their rejection of global warming claims. Yet an uncritical attitude toward the leading climate-change activists may be even more perilous. While much of their science may be sound, their rhetoric and apparent motivations are alarmingly similar to those of the self-styled “progressives” of the early 20th Century who were hostile to democratic choice, promoted their politics in religious terms, attempted to “correct” what they saw as the psychological and moral failures of the people who opposed them, and welcomed war as an opportunity to discipline and re-engineer society. Talking about climate change in this fashion may not have been the main reason so little was accomplished in Copenhagen. But it didn’t help, either—especially when the United States is trying to convince so many poorer nations of the righteous nature of its cause.

Russell’s on the right track here — no one likes to be lectured — before catching a serious case of South Park-style enviro-smugness himself with the sentence I highlighted above. As fellow liberal Ron Rosenbaum wrote a couple of weeks ago at Pajamas:

Nothing in the climate debate which I’ve been paying sporadic attention to is more repulsive than the global warming advocates’ attempt to smear skeptics of their theories and models and predictions as “denialists.” As if they were some analog of holocaust deniers.

Not all those concerned about climate change use the term. (Some stick to a sneering use of “skeptics” as a stigmatizing word, as if science itself wasn’t an ongoing process of skepticism about received wisdom. Copernicus was a skeptic about the idea the sun revolved around the earth. He wasn’t a “solar denialist.”)

But nothing causes me more revulsion — and skepticism — than the warming advocates’ (I think the CRU scandal — and the shameful reaction to it — has revealed many of the most celebrated of them to be more p.r. advocates than scrupulous scientists) application of the opprobrious term “denialist” to anyone who questions the work they have so assiduously screened from scrutiny.

When I started paying attention again to the controversy after the release of the pathetic CRU e-mails, I noticed the most desperate of the last ditch defenders of the CRU charlatans — and indeed the CRU charlatans themselves — would resort to calling any of those who disagreed “denialists.” That the use of “denialist” had grown as the failure of their predictions (the discredited “hockey stick” chart) increased.

To me that shameful, trivializing word use alone is more exposure than any e-mail could be of their lack of critical intelligence of the sort that makes them unfit to call themselves scientists, or, in the case of many of their “green journalist” sycophants, ignorant of how actual science works.

In a post at Newsbusters that dovetails remarkably well with the above items, Matthew Sheffield writes:

Climate alarmists have put enormous pressure on the western media to suppress knowledge of facts inconvenient to their scientific arguments using a variety of methods to supress dissenting opinion.

Besides threatening journalists, promoting the use of Nazi-esque insults like the word “deniers,” and bullying scientists who publish research papers critical of their near-religious beliefs, alarmists have taken to the web with aplomb, most famously exposed in the ongoing “ClimateGate” scandal.

Engaging in politicized science via email isn’t the only cyber activity that left-enviro activists engage in however. Wikipedia is also a favorite target, particularly for a British global warming activist named William Connolley who seems to have made it his life’s mission to censor climate realists in the online encyclopedia.

Connolley claims he is employed currently as a software developer and has not disclosed that he is paid to engage in wiki enviro-activism. Considering that most of his wiki contributions seem to happen outside of business hours GMT, it seems likely that Connolley is interacting with Wikipedia on his personal time.

Climate alarmism seems to have become a personal obsession for him, however. Just this past Thursday, the UK Green Party politician made 31 comments or revisions to articles according to his user contributions page.

In the month of August 2009 (one which I picked randomly), Connolley had a total of 451 edits or comments, averaging out to 15 every day of the month. That, mind you, is with a two-week hiatus of August 15th through 24th where Connolley made no edits factored in.

During June of 2009, Connolley literally could not take a break from Wikipedia, making a whopping total of 815 contributions to the site spread over every day of the month, an average of 27 each day.

Just business, or in this case, anti-business as usual, at the Faith-Based Encyclopedia.