Sunday, March 11, 2007

Death threats for climate skeptics

Yes, it has come to that.
Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.


Not that surprising, really, and no doubt related to this other headline at Drudge, NEW HOLLYWOOD BAD GUYS: ENVIRONMENTAL VILLAINS... DEVELOPING...(no link given).

Every public figure probably receives death threats because the world is full of loonies, and I don't mean Canadian dollars. Even so, it is strange that climate scientists should be receiving such threats. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing; everyone reads about tyrannical regimes and the heroes who resisted, and no doubt most of us like to think we would be among the good guys. I expect 100% of academics think they would be among that hallowed band, and now they have the oportunity to discover if they truly have the moral balls they think they do. Lysenkoism in its modern guise is no joke. Who will support the skeptics? Who will resist the political temptations and their attendent trappings of money and power? We will find out.

Update:

Comments on reactions here. Apparently Durkin wanted to name the show Apocalypse My Arse. Note on Durkin, he was associated with the magazine Living Marxism, so perhaps a Marxist of the classic sort. Durkin responds to these revelations:
‘Shock, horror’, he says. ‘Exposing that a journalist has a Marxist background is like exposing that he wears trousers.’

Heh. It is worth remembering that Marx was a great proponent of industrialization as an improvement over peasant farming. That is why the USSR and its imitators sold themselves as the way to the industrial future, it just didn't work out all that well. Anyway, you can see that point of view at the end of the show where the Greens are painted as Luddite villains holding back third world development. The Spiked Magazine interview with Durkin is here.

h/t: under the whip in the comment thread at Tim Blair.

5 comments:

Reliapundit said...

the left wuz/iz stalinist: follow the party line or be purged/reeducated/or die.

for the common good, of course.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

One of the constants of human existence seems to be the need to demonize. It used to be we demonized the tribe on the other side of the hill. Then we got more abstract and learned to demonize people who didn't speak our language or didn't go to the same church. All of these forms of demonization have now been forbidden. Climate-change doubters seem like a worthy target.

Barry Dauphin said...

Perhaps they will simply sentence the person to be Algore's housekeeper-a job so vast, it never ends.

Unknown said...

We also demonize people who raise our taxes and if these loons keep yammering until we get a carbon tax...they will discover what it is like to be the demon. Idiots.

After a certain amount of time passes and we are still here people are going to think they have been fed a line...

BTW, ever notice how no one expects the Russians to do anything about climate change?

richard mcenroe said...

The Democrats have announced a New Policy, covering Matt Sanchez, global warming and anything else they find convenient:

Don't Ask
Don't Tell
Don't Talk Back