Jonah Goldberg deftly skewers Ellen Goodman’s assertion that global warming skeptics are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
This sort of thing is the exact reason why global warming is not science. It’s the antithesis of science, and a climate in which any dissent is shot down is an affront to the scientific method. If scientists cannot have a free debate over the merits of a theory, then that theory is no longer operating on scientific terms, but as religious conviction. The argument that there is absolutely no room for doubt on global warming is an abject falsity — there is plenty of scientific debate about whether the warming trend is anthropogenic or not, and if so to what extent. Yet global warming proponents seem to want to destroy any attempt to crash their precious “consensus” and introduce challenging opinions.
That isn’t science. Science is about debate and skepticism, and the global warming debate is about blind belief and fanaticism. Real scientists don’t feel the need to use Inquisition tactics against skeptics of a particular theory. Real scientists don’t need to engage in acts of scientific censorship or launch broad ad hominem attacks against prominent skeptics.
All of these traits are indicative of a system of belief that has come unrooted from the skeptical tradition of hard science and become innately political and in many ways religious. Even if the pro-global warming forces happen to be right — even if the climate is warming and human activity is to blame — it does not excuse the way in which this “debate” is being carried out.
Is this the same Jonah Goldberg who, two years ago yesterday, bet a liberal blogger $1,000 that by February 8, 2007, Iraq would be a smoothly functioning democracy with minimal secterian violence, and a clear majority of Americans believing the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do? And who ultimately buckled in making good on his bet because the liberal blogger “never officially agreed to the bet”?
But now we’re supposed to trust the judgment on this guy on global warming? I can’t believe this guy can muster up the nerve to make a public appearance on this day, let alone provoke his minions in the conservative blogosphere to defer to his authority on another topic.
I see. Goldberg is wrong in his prediction, so he needs to retire from public life. If that were the rule for pundits, Paul “the Great Unraveling” Krugman would have been run off years ago.
But I would have certainly doubted Goldberg’s judgment, had he paid off the “wager”. I don’t know where you grew up. In my old neighborhood, nobody but a chump pays off when the other guy doesn’t put his money at risk.
It was with Juan Cole, who didn’t take the bet… which is unfortunate, as he would have won…
“I see. Goldberg is wrong in his prediction, so he needs to retire from public life.”
A brief mea culpa period would have been merciful. Only a dedicated Kool Aid-swilling conservative can humiliate himself with the kind of brazen public display of wrongheadedness we saw from Goldberg on the biggest issue of our time one day, and then return to smugly asserting his monopoly on the truth, all science to the contrary be damned, the next day.
Oh, dear. That Kool Aid-swilling metaphor is deader than Jim Jones. How does “Franken-censed liberals” grab you?