Statists of Fear

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland over the weekend, noted climatologist Bill Clinton declared that the world's greatest crisis is... temperature change. The press reported Clinton saying to the overfed corporate toadies before him at the World Economic Forum that 'climate change' is a profound 'worry' to him.

'It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible,' he said.

What will arrest the march of civilization, or at least upend economies, is not global warming but panic over the delusions about it — panic which could lead to catastrophically stupid regulations that will wreck businesses. There is a big push on — I noticed in Sunday's Washington Post that its predictable story  sketching out doomsday global warming scenarios appeared above the fold — to revive this panic.

Tom Bethell's book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,  recently released in paperback, effectively exposes this propaganda that masquerades as science. Scientists can't state with any certainty that global warming is a crisis, but they state it anyway, to stir the pot and drive politically correct policies. They are in the business of 'peddling fear,' writes Bethell, who quotes Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider as saying:

'We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.'

And there are doubts aplenty on the subject of global warming. Hans von Storch from Germany is one scientist who knows that the 'science' around this claim is nothing more than propagandistic conjecture and hype. Bethell quotes him saying that climatologists tend to 'make only comments that are politically correct' and that their wobbly research is at the service of fear—mongering:

'The pattern is always the same: the significance of individual events is processed to suit the media and cleverly dramatized; when prognoses for the future are cited, among all the possible scenarios it is regularly the one with the highest rates of increase in greenhouse gas emissions — and thus with the most drastic climatic consequences — that is chosen. Equally plausible variations with significantly lower emission increases go unmentioned.

Whom does this serve? It is assumed that fear can motivate listeners, but it is forgotten that it mobilizes them only in the short term.... Each successive recent claim about the future of the climate and of the planet must be ever more dramatic than the previous one. Once apocalyptic heat waves have been predicted, the climate—based extinction of animal species no longer attracts attention. Time to move on the reversal of the Gulf Stream. Thus there arises a spiral of exaggeration.'

And scientists can't stop the spiral, because to do so would hurt such a worthy enivornmentalist cause, says von Storch:

'The incremental dramatization comes to be accepted, while any correction of the exaggeration is regarded as dangerous, because it is politically inopportune. Doubts are not made public; rather, people are led to believe in a solid edifice of knowledge that needs only to be completed at the outer edges.'

Pols, who care even less about evidentiary standards than scientists eager to appear on the evening news, will occasionally say that making false claims about global warming is no big deal since it brings about a more 'just' world. In another revealing quote culled by Tom Bethell, Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, once blurted out:

'No matter if the science is phony, there are collateral environmental benefits...Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.'

This is what Bill Clinton is up to as well:  he doesn't know the first thing about science, yet he must act as if he knows for certain that global warming menaces the earth in order to promote global statism. He will whip up hysteria in the hopes that that will lead to severe economic constraints upon business and expanded government power over economies.

The environment is not a threat to the march of civilization. But environmentalists are. And the hottest and most polluted air comes from the mouths of lying pols who spread their propaganda at global forums. Should they scare and snooker the world into accepting Kyoto—style strangulations of economies, what will grind to a halt is the human life for which the environment exists.

George Neumayr is a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.