The Pseudo-Scientists of Earthism

Kenneth P. Green’s recently raised points about saving “climate science” from itself are certainly well taken. By all means, let us rescue good science from the politico-charlatans and at last find how much “there” is really there in regard to climate change.

It will be a formidable task. But before the rescue party sets out—everything in its season—there needs to be a time of staring; a time of drinking in the spectacle, the enormity, as Dr. Johnson might have put it, of what has happened.

I do not mean mere delight in discomfiture (although, I confess, that is fun that some science is “settled” on what is little more than a thumb-sucking term paper). I mean a sober appreciation of how shameless, how contemptuously self-righteous, how immune to scorn the Climategate perpetrators are. It’s not that they don’t get it; it’s just that they don’t care.

They don’t care what the unwashed, the unannointed in the religion of Earthism think. They do not appreciate how exquisitely they fit Goethe’s observation that “as soon as anyone belongs to a narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone.” And most of all, they do not seem to understand the damage they have done to honest science in the public eye.

Ralph Bennett writes the Automobility column for American.com