Brown Admin attacks climate ‘deniers’

Aug. 17, 2012

By Joseph Perkins

“Climate change,” declares the home page for the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, “poses an immediate threat to California’s economy, environment, and to public health.”

The Brown administration is “taking action” to avert the worst global disaster since the meteorite (or meteorites, the science is unclear) that wiped out the dinosaurs, but it is being obstructed, the Brownies lament, by those who dare to question the prevailing wisdom on climate change; who “oppose the move to renewable energy and clean transportation.”

Well, the guv’s Office of Planning and Research — OPR, in bureaucrat speak — just isn’t going to stand for it anymore. So it has devoted its entire Website to taking on the evil climate change “deniers.”

“Just as we reached a point where we stopped debating whether cigarette smoke caused cancer,” the site declares, “we need to end the climate change debate and focus on how to solve the problem.”

And that begins by debunking claims of climate change “deniers,” who, as the Brown administration sees it, are on a moral par with devil-worshipping tobacco executives.

The deniers share certain traits, OPR states. “Many have little or no expertise in climate science.” Also, “Many receive funding for their efforts from industries with a financial interest in ignoring climate change.”

Of course, many if not most of those who subscribe to the climate change orthodoxy — that human activity accounts for much of the global warming trend observed in recent years — also have little or no expertise in climate science.

That includes Al Gore, for instance, whose 2006 climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won two Academy Awards (one of which was for Best Original Song), and propelled the former Veep into stardom. He also won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on “climate change.”

Your tax dollars

As to the insinuation that climate change “deniers” have been corrupted by funding from industries that couldn’t care less if Mother Earth is suffering hot flashes, that dirty industry money pales in comparison to the $2.6 billion the Obama administration proposed last year to fund research reinforcing climate change alarmism.

The reason the Brown administration has gone to such extraordinary lengths to discredit climate change “deniers” is because it blames them for polls indicating that “only about half of less than half of the American public is convinced that emissions from human activities bear responsibility.”

But it’s not because of climate change “deniers” that Americans are skeptical that global warming poses an “immediate threat” to life as they know it. It’s because they have heard similar warnings before of impending climate catastrophe that proved to be false alarms.

In 1975, Newsweek magazine published a scary jeremiad titled, “The cooling world.” It warned that “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down.” Time magazine ran cover stories such as, “The Cooling of America.”

Newsweek cited scientific studies, just as Gov. Brown’s OCR does on its website. And it warned of disastrous consequence if government did nothing, same as OCR.

The scientific community was dead wrong on global cooling four decades ago. All climate change skeptics — not “deniers” — are saying is that maybe, just maybe, the threat of global warming might be similarly overstated.