As I have written, I am a global-warming skeptic, not a denier. The fact that lots of environmental scientists with impressive academic backgrounds say global warming has not been proven, and even if it is happening there is no evidence human behavior is causing it, has made me skeptical. But there are also lots of environmental scientists with impressive academic backgrounds who say it is happening and mankind is the cause. Hence I am not denying the possibility.
Also, being a skeptic instead of a denier may keep me out of jail. Twenty academics from several universities, including Columbia and George Mason University, have written a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch demanding that global-warming deniers be criminally prosecuted. Adding insult to injury, they are asking that the RICO Act — the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act — be used to prosecute these deniers because these criminals “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.”
RICO was originally passed to prosecute members of organized crime—the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, Mexican drug lords, etc.—so, in effect, these academics are accusing global warming deniers, especially those in the scientific community, of being hoodlums who must be prosecuted for pointing out, as they often do, that there has been no measurable increase in Planet Earth’s temperature since 1997. Or when they point out that Mother Nature puts far more of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere than humans do. This is heresy, and, as the 20 academics wrote, “It is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible, so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding ways to effectively restabilize the Earth’s climate.”
One problem here is that the First Amendment still protects free speech, meaning global warming deniers have every right to express their disagreement with the global-warming believers’ contention that, as President Obama puts it, the “science is settled” on global warming. Another problem is that, of all the segments of our society that ought to be defending free speech, it should be academia.
All the more so because the science isn’t settled, as a recent study made clear, at least to me, which is why I remain a skeptic (well, that and wanting to avoid jail time for being a denier). In an article based on this study the authors wrote, “True experts in the field understand that climate change is highly immature. We are in a period of ‘negative discovery,’ in that the more we know about climate change, the more we realize we don’t know … while someday we may be able to meaningfully predict climate, it is not possible now.”
