Tuesday, June 17, 2008
"Apocalyptic Global Warming"?
I think this writer has it exactly right.
And I think H. L. Mencken had it exactly right.
And what do you think?...
And I think H. L. Mencken had it exactly right.
And what do you think?...
At FrontPageMag.com, Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson explains the methodology:
"The challenge for Gore was the inconvenient truth that, in a democracy, a would-be central planner needs to get the masses on his side, too. To do that, he borrowed a strategy encapsulated in H.L. Mencken’s statement, 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.' Apocalyptic GW became Al Gore’s hobgoblin of choice.
Gore needed the scientific community to back up his assertions and the media to spread the word. Enlisting the help of the media was easy (apocalyptic fantasies are sure ratings winners), but getting enough scientists on board was trickier. When Gore started his GW campaign in the early 1990s, a contemporary Gallup poll of scientists showed that only 18 percent thought there was any evidence to support Gore’s theory. Even a survey conducted by Greenpeace found only 13 percent of climatologists willing to declare GW 'probable.'
Nevertheless, Gore repeatedly claimed that (literally) 98 percent of scientists agreed with him, and he exhorted reporters to ignore skeptics. Right from the outset, the GW cult (like other illiberal movements, such as communism and fascism) had to resort to the 'big lie' technique to make it appear that the science of GW was settled"
