Is there nothing leftist global warming activists won’t do in an effort to censor and silence critics? Desmogblog.com has posted a letter by Laurie David to the University of Virginia, urging it to fire Patrick Michaels for accepting money from coal interests and coal-burning electric utility companies to help support his research, advocacy and consulting group New Hope Environmental Services.
Are we to suppose that leftist professors never sell their services or accept money to help support what they are already doing or want to do anyway? Or am I expecting too much consistency from mindguards here?
Apparently, Desmogblog is jumping on the bandwagen and will be writing its own letter. And then they have the gall to post about Gore’s new book, which whines hypocritically about skeptics allegedly trying to quell debate on global warming. What’s that now? The pot calling the alleged kettle black?
It must never occur to these watermelon environmentalists that critics of global warming alarmism might be supported (in whole or in part) by corporations because their expertise and pre-existing ideas are attractive to the companies. The mere existence of such funding is not evidence that the scientist is dishonestly adapting his views to those of his client. For more on funding issues and alarmist ad hominems, see my previous post on the subject.
And be sure to read the comments on that Desmogblog post to see more silly and unsupported personal attacks on Michaels’s integrity.
It’s interesting how desperate and vitriolic they seem to be to discredit Michaels. Perhaps it is because he is a climate scientist who has published in the top journals (Science, Nature, and others) and, because he explicitly accepts AGW, they cannot credibly label him a “Denialist.” He has credibility and is not so easy to dismiss. Therefore, they must attack with all the more venom and guile in order to get him out of the picture. See his Cato Institute bio, his UVA bio, and his group blog World Climate Report.
Whether you agree with Michaels or not, these tyrannical tactics of the CAGW mindguards are unconscionable.
P.S. For any CAGW mindguards who read this, CAGW stands for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming; it is the C to which I object primarily and the underhanded tactics employed to enforce the orthodoxy, I’m on the fence about the A.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the