Climate Change 'as Certain as Auschwitz,' Claims Guardian

Global warming ‘deniers’ are as bad as ‘Holocaust deniers’ because climate change is as “as certain as Auschwitz”, a Guardian columnist, Nick Cohen, has claimed. (H/T Marc Morano at Climate Depot)

Anyone who disagrees with this is a “bed-wetting kidult”, he says.

Oh, and also, climate change deniers are a bit like people who believe in aliens.

Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point afew years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporatelobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they saidunbribed. The movement was in the grip of “cognitive dissonance”, acondition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicagohousewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resignfrom their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was toengulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors.Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.

Cohen has a well-deserved reputation as one of the British left’s most thoughtful, articulate and original journalists. He is sufficiently eclectic to write an excellent monthly column on television for the high-brow, right-wing journal Standpoint. And he is one of only very few left-liberal commentators to have called out the left’s hypocrisy and double-standards on Islamism. His book What’s Left is a corrosive attack on the way so many left-wingers have abandoned their progressive principles by refusing to condemn the abuse of women by Islamic fundamentalists and by effectively condoning the worst excesses of jihadism, including 9/11.

Unfortunately, though, it would appear that on the climate change issue he has abandoned his customary rigour and intellectual independence and fallen victim to the environmental left’s lazy groupthink. To appreciate just how lazy, here’s a website which shows just how often the “denier” smear has been used by the left against sceptics in order to try to close down the climate change debate.

He asks:

Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuadecountries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit(not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human raceto put the future ahead of the present?

But actually, had Cohen bothered to research the issue rather than simply regurgitating the green propaganda associated with NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth and warmed over in the pages of HuffPo, Slate and Climate Progress, he would not have needed to ask these questions rhetorically. The answers would have been bleeding obvious.

You will never persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards until you have made an irrefutable scientific and economic case for doing so.

The scientific case is looking shakier by the minute: if there has been no global warming since 1997, why should we stake our faith in all those doomsday computer models which failed to predict this “pause”?

The economic case is non-existent. By the time – if it ever does – catastrophic global warming makes its presence known in the future, our descendants will all be considerably richer than we are and therefore have more than enough money spare to take whatever remedial actions are necessary.

Perhaps finally Cohen, as normally careful journalist, ought to consider whether the “Holocaust denial” really is an appropriate metaphor to use to describe as a blanket dismissal for anyone who is unconvinced by climate change alarmism.

Since he obviously hasn’t got time to research this issue, I’ll help him out.

Number of dead directly attributable to the Holocaust: around six million.

Number of dead directly attributable to “climate change”: none.

Do the math, Cohen.