How Green Gullibility, Hyperpartisanship Are Wrecking The Climate Movement

by Walter Russell Mead The American Interest (excerpted)

One of the biggest intellectual failures of the global green movement against climate change is the persistent failure of its leaders and spokespeople to grasp the way their own advocacy fatally undermines their credibility. They blame cunning, unscrupulous and well funded enemies for disasters that their own inaccuracies, overstatements and disingenuous advocacy have brought on their movement.

Robert Murphy over at Master Resource has an excellent essay that shows how the credulous and gloating response of so many greens to the Heartland Institute affair and the faked document at its core made the green movement much less credible as a source of reliable information about climate matters.

Says Murphy,

The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause. Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.

Murphy is writing here more about the green advocacy and blogging community than about the actual scientists, but this is all the more important as illustrating how advocacy has gotten so far away from science and ended by weakening the credibility of the green agenda. Read the whole thing.

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The root cause of all this remains, in VM’s opinion, a truly idiotic set of policy proposals that, no matter the state of the underlying science, simply cannot and will not be implemented.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make green. Just ask Peter Gleick.

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Full article here