The left uses 'science' to shut down free speech

 Stephen Moore:

It was about eight to 10 years ago that the Left made a unilateral decision to shut down all opposition and any skepticism about climate change by pronouncing that the debate was over.

The “scientific consensus” had been reached, as if sent down on tablets from God, that mankind was causing the rapid warming of the planet. Period. End of argument. Doubters will be denounced as science deniers and stripped of their science credentials and muzzled by the speech police.

This idea of a scientific consensus is, of course, the diametric opposite of what scientific inquiry is all about. It is completely ahistorical. History’s greatest minds and inventors were people who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day. It’s an updated version of the Flat Earth Societies in the Middle Ages that would imprison those who dared question the scientific consensus of the time that the Earth was flat. The Spanish Inquisition tortured heretics who questioned papal orthodoxy.

The irony of the modern-day inquisitionists is that they are the very people who were the doomsayers of the 1970s who have been so consistently wrong about the future. These were the people who peddled the “population bomb,” which fizzled. They were the ones who said the Earth was cooling and that we were headed into another Ice Age. They were the ones who said we were running out of energy, food and farmland, and we were headed to a Malthusian nightmarish future. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

You’d think they would be humbled. But they are reiterating their certainty that they are the fountains of wisdom. And now they are getting dangerous with their heavy-handed tactics to squash dissent.
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In case you haven't noticed the poles are still not ice-free and coastal cities are still not underwater despite predictions from the left.  It is another case where the "scientific consensus" was wrong.