The men and women of science are supposed to be rational, sober professionals. Yet a few hundred have decided to behave as rabble, having been overtaken by global warming hysteria.

Reuters reported Saturday that “almost 400 scientists have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change.” The objective is to warn the rest of us “that failure could inflict ‘incalculable human suffering.’”

To say these activist-researchers have broken “with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest” is almost an understatement. They have chosen to align themselves with the Extinction Rebellion, an organization that’s been described as a “loopy middle-class doomsday cult.”

That description by Sky News reporter Carol Malone is overly generous. The Extinction Rebellion is a criminal enterprise made up of quite clearly disturbed people. Members have been arrested for blocking the entrance of a London airport, and claiming ownership of it for the mob, while dancing in what appears to be a restricted area behind razor wire. One particularly childish and self-indulgent “protester” climbed atop a passenger jet to make his point. Firemen had to remove him with a cherry-picker.

These “rebels” have also used a fire truck to spray fake blood, at one point losing “control of the hose, drenching a bystander and spraying several fellow activists” at the British Treasury building, “as 1,800 liters of an organic liquid containing beetroot spurted out wildly across the street,” the Guardian has reported.

Admittedly these are rather petty crimes, but they’re gateways to the harder stuff.

On this side of the Atlantic, “tourists and workers on Wall Street” were met a week ago “by a jarring spectacle: protesters, some lying in pools of fake blood outside the New York Stock Exchange, some dancing and others chanting, all to call attention to people killed by climate-related disease and disaster,” says the New York Times.

Three days later, at least 62 were arrested around Times Square. These folks who are supposedly wiser than the rest of us because of their divine foresight parked a sailboat on Broadway and West 44th Street, sat around it with arms interlocked, and hectored harried New Yorkers by screeching through a bullhorn.

At best, the members of Extinction Rebellion are acting like petulant children. At worst, they’re near-terrorists. Though not as violent, they’re still possessed by the zealotry common among deranged radicals. Thoughtful people don’t glue themselves to the ground or government buildings, criminally block the free movement of people in public places (or, to paraphrase the clever Jim Treacher, “save the planet by making you late for work”), nor allow themselves to be “driven by sheer irrationalism.”

Nor do clear-thinking people turn themselves into public spectacles, evidently fueled by whatever psychoses haunt them. The videos at the links are compelling evidence that the movement’s disciples are “teched” in the head.

Worse, they’re ignorant, and overly willing dupes. They’ve fallen for what is so obviously an exaggeration if not an outright fraud. And they should be, as British columnist Brendan O’Neill suggests, “criticized and ridiculed out of existence.”

The rebellion “wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age,” O’Neill continues. “It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution,” and roll back its “liberation of mankind from the brutishness and ignorance of life on the land.” The activists would “recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally’, never travelled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38.”

Is this the sort of organization that scientists want to be in league with? Any researcher who would call these people comrades should turn in their credentials.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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