Those people are criminally negligent. As Torcello puts it:
Imagine if in L'Aquila, scientists themselves had made every effort to communicate the risks of living in an earthquake zone. Imagine that they even advocated for a scientifically informed but costly earthquake readiness plan.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.
Attempts to deceive the public on climate change, and to consequently block any public policy to tackle it, contribute to roughly 150,000 deaths a year already—Torcello again:
More deaths can already be attributed to climate change than the L'Aquila earthquake and we can be certain that deaths from climate change will continue to rise with global warming. Nonetheless, climate denial remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action in the very countries most responsible for the crisis.
Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.
Let's make a clear distinction here: I'm not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.
You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth's atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150's gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.
Nor am I talking about simple skeptics, particularly the scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy. That is part and parcel of the important public policy discussion about what we do next.
But there is scientific skepticism... and there is a malicious, profiteering quietist agenda posturing as skepticism. There is uncertainty about whether man-made climate change can be stopped or reversed... and there is the body of purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters who exploit the smallest uncertainty at the edges of a settled science.
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.
Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming
In 2013, there were 10,885 published, peer-reviewed articles that researched anthropogenic, or…Read more
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.
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There is a lot we can do societally, now, not just in terms of reducing our contributions to the global climate's maladies but in terms of preparing for its effects: rising seas and temperatures. Changes in crops and food supplies. Increased population density and disease. There is a chance to make society safer and smarter.
If you have all of this information at your command and that reform project still scares you, if you think it necessarily entails a sacrifice of your personal freedom that you cannot brook, fine. That's a debate we can have. But if you are actively trying to deny people the tools they need to inform themselves, to protect themselves against a scientifically proven threat to life and limb, you shouldn't be part of the debate. You should be punished for your self-serving malice.
http://gawker.com/arrest-climate-change-deniers-1553719888
Hello futurecurrents:
You say "We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people's deaths. It's time to punish the climate-change liars."
You also reference this article to support your position:
Arrest Climate-Change Deniers
http://gawker.com/arrest-climate-change-deniers-1553719888
These claims about Man-made climate change/global warming are suppose to be based on science. And science is based on hypotheses which can be proved or disproved by making observations, tests and measurements. Much of science can be readily proven or disproved through direct observation of the results from experiments that provide good data to prove or disprove hypotheses, eg classical physics.
For other areas of science such as the man made global warming hypothesis the data is not so clear and scientists do not all agree. When the data is clear scientists change their opinions and we can make decisions based on their findings because their findings are supported by data. Those so called scientists who believe in unprovable hypotheses for example perpetual motion machines are simply ignored. No need to arrest them. They fail science in school and no one hires them to make their silly machines, problem solved.
Disagreement over man made global warming is a part of science. If we arrest those who do not agree with the official government approved version of science then we have reduced global warming science to the level of Nazi science or communist science. Hitler opposed what he called "Jewish science" and would have arrested Einstein the "German science" denier if Einstein had not already escaped Germany. The Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev who hypothesized an economic economic supercycle pattern called the “Kondratiev wave” was purged by Stalin in 1938. He was purged because his science findings on capitalism did not agree with the official communist theory on capitalism. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for advocating the the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view of the solar system which contradicted the Catholic Church's geocentric (earth-at-the-center) view of the solar system. Galileo was found guilty of heresy.
Science should be settled by scientists not by the courts, Nazis, communists, the global warming church or Salem witch trials.
For example the below "National Review v. Mann" article describes Michael Mann's attempt to use the courts to enforce his view of global warming science.
National Review v. Mann
By Bradley A. Benbrook, Stephen M. Duvernay, Ilya Shapiro & Trevor Burrus, August 11, 2014
http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/national-review-v-mann
This idea of arresting people (climate-change liars) who disagree about science is very dangerous and is a direct attack on the first amendment of the US constitution. When you lower a science to that level you will be rubbing shoulders with people responsible for the deaths of millions of people who believed that those who disagree with their version of science should be arrested.
Anubis
