Not Helping On The Climate Thing

Just to make it clear, there's helpful strategies for dealing with climate change deniers...and then there's Gawker's Adam Weinstein, who thinks it's time to start dealing with professional climate deniers through legal means as they put all of us in jeopardy.

I'm talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I'm talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I'm talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

Deniers will, of course, fuss and stomp and beat their breasts and claim this is persecution, this is a violation of free speech. Of course, they already say that now, when judges force them into doing penance for comparing climate scientists to child-rapist and denial poster-boy Jerry Sandusky.

But First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. You shouldn't be able to yell "balderdash" at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing: This is a problem, and we should take some preparations for when it becomes a bigger problem.

Willful, profiteering public deniers of climate change can compare themselves to Galileo all they want, pretending that they're voices of sanity in a cruel wilderness. But Galileo had science on his side. He had a telescope aimed at the cosmos. Climate deniers have their heads jammed in the sand... or in a barrel of money.

I agree with Weinstein that the multi-billion dollar effort to convince Americans that there is nothing we can or should even bother doing about climate change is pretty awful.  Unfortunately, it's not criminal.  (However I have the same problem with anti-vaxxers, and at least you can make individual child endangerment arguments there from a legal standpoint.)

But this is entirely unhelpful and just feeds the "climate cult/persecution complex" that all of these guys are counting on.  It's playing into their hands and frankly, it's stupid to do so.

The entire point is that this is a battle of public opinion, and Weinstein is doing more damage than good.  Besides, the real problem is of course Republicans who are trying to make climate research all but illegal in the first place.