The globo warmers war against dissent

Walter Williams:

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The Washington Times reported July 16 that Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), sent a threatening missive to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington: "Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on."

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Debra Saunders also ask why there is a need to silence critics.

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It's the same story run repeatedly in mainstream media: The overwhelming majority of scientists believe the debate on global warming is over -- but if there are any dissenting scientists left, they've been bought.

Here's the rub: If dissent is so rare, why do global-warming conformists feel the strong need to argue that minority views should be dismissed as nutty or venal? Why not posit that there is such a thing as honest disagreement on the science?

As for the overwhelming majority of scientists believing that man is behind global warming, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer, now at the University of Alabama, told me, "It's like an urban legend. There has never been any kind of vote on this issue." He referred me to a 2003 survey in which two German environmental scientists asked more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries if they thought humans caused climate change: 56 percent answered yes, 30 percent said no.

What really frosts me about the Newsweek story is that it concentrates on industry funding for skeptics while ignoring the money that pours into pro-global-warming coffers. That focus ignores where the big grant money goes -- to pay for crisis-mongering research. Or as Reid Bryson, the father of scientific climatology, told the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., "If you want to be an eminent scientist, you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh, global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"

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As John Leo notes below, the media has their narrative and they are sticking to it regardless of the facts. Except in this case they are engaging in an active attempt to suppress the speech of anyone with a counter opinion. That is not a wise idea for a business that is based on the rights of free expression found in the 1st Amendment.