Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal, sees the intellectual methods of true believers in global warming as instructively similar to Stalinists: (HT: NRO Corner)
• Revolutionary fervor: There's a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of "bourgeois" values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that "our lifestyles are unsustainable." Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that "civil disobedience has a role to play" in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.)
• Utopianism: In the world as it is, climate alarmists see humanity hurtling toward certain doom. In the world as it might be, humanity has seen the light and changed its patterns of behavior, becoming the green equivalent of the Soviet "new man." At his disposal are technologies that defy the laws of thermodynamics. The problems now attributed to global warming abate or disappear.
• Anti-humanism: In his 2007 best seller "The World Without Us," environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it's no bad thing. The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that "no human is genuinely 'carbon neutral'"—its latest argument against children. John Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling. But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.
• Intolerance: Why did the scientists at the heart of Climategate go to such lengths to hide or massage the data if truth needs no defense? Why launch campaigns of obstruction and vilification against gadfly Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick if they were such intellectual laughingstocks? It is the unvarying habit of the totalitarian mind to treat any manner of disagreement as prima facie evidence of bad faith and treason.
• Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem.
• Indifference to evidence: Climate alarmists have become brilliantly adept at changing their terms to suit their convenience. So it's "global warming" when there's a heat wave, but it's "climate change" when there's a cold snap. The earth has registered no discernable warming in the past 10 years: Very well then, they say, natural variability must be the cause. But as for the warming that did occur in the 1980s and 1990s, that plainly was evidence of man-made warming. Am I missing something here?
• Grandiosity: In "SuperFreakonomics," Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner give favorable treatment to an idea to cool the earth by pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, something that could be done cheaply and quickly. Maybe it would work, or maybe it wouldn't. But one suspects that the main reason the chapter was the subject of hysterical criticism is that it didn't propose to deal with global warming by re-engineering the world economy. The penchant for monumentalism is yet another constant feature of the totalitarian mind.
Today, of course, the very idea of totalitarianism is considered passé. Yet the course of the 20th century was defined by totalitarian regimes, and it would be dangerous to assume that the habits of mind that sustained them have vanished into the mists. In Copenhagen, they are once again at play—and that, comrades, is no accident.
See also Mona Charen's column "Toprquemada in East Anglia." She explains why people don't buy global warming. Among other reasons:
It’s Freudian. The Viennese analyst taught that if you say you hate your mother, you hate your mother. And if you say you love your mother, you are in denial about hating your mother. Climate-change believers are like Freudians. If the weather is warm, it’s proof of global warming. But if the weather is cool, this is evidence of the sinister tricks global warming can play.
These are her concluding paragraphs:
Fool me once. The same people whose hair is on fire now about climate change have dressed up in fright masks before. Thirty years ago they were (no joke) enormously agitated about the coming new ice age. From these same precincts (the Club of Rome, 1972) we were warned that the world was rapidly running out of oil, gas, aluminum, lead, zinc, copper, tin, and uranium. (We didn’t.) At the same time, all of the smart people were absolutely convinced that overpopulation was the greatest threat to the globe and to humanity itself. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, offered in 1980 that “if I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” That same year, the Carter administration issued a global forecast predicting that “the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically . . . and the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.” Um, no.
The scaremongers’ track record is poor. For people who seem to worship Mother Earth, they are oddly arrogant about their ability to understand complex systems like climate. Every day brings new discoveries about the incredibly complicated interplay of oceans, atmospheric gases, algae, wind, plants, animal excretions, solar radiation, and so forth.
The East Anglia e-mails reveal a priesthood becoming more and more hysterical as their certainty evaporates. Like all orthodoxies under duress, they are making war on heresy.