...those dedicated to establishing the frontier of knowledge that as yet comes closest to the truth, while inconveniently at odds with the position taken by those with the resources to manipulate the actual picture. This is what the nobel-prize winning Al Gore and his co-awardee, the IPCC panel, have been doing all along.
If Al Gore (see end of post) were to take his own stance seriously (restrict freedom of speech of those who appear factually wrong), he should shut himself up. By flat earthers he refers to people who got their facts wrong, and he is one of them - in a big way. A British judge last month ruled that copies of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth could be distributed in schools only if they were accompanied by a disclaimer listing the film’s factual errors; for more on Gore's tall tales and the broader picture from the point of view of this blog:
See my former posts:
[1] General Commentary - The Abuse of Environmental Concern
[13] News from Absurdistan - The Sun Queen of Germany
[37] News from Absurdistan - Once Respected Institutions...
[41] News from Absirdistan - The Art of Turning Figments of Peril into...
[46] News from Absurdistan - Global Scaring
[48] News from Absurdistan - The Global Warming Swindle
Freedom of expression has not been "invented" to protect the views one holds, the point of it is to protect the views one does not endorse.
It is the Internet, i.e. free intellectual competition on an unprecedented scale, that gives us all a chance to become aware of and debunk the perilous nonsense that people like Al Gore are trying to capitalise on.
Al Gore assumes the posture of arbiter of truth, posing unashamedly as the great inquisitor who arrogates to himself the right to decide who is or is not telling the truth and accordingly will be allowed to express their views, to what extent and for how long. Al Gore is a power maniac - and a dogmatic democrat (like most of us and therefore very popular) - incapable of grasping that science is not conducted by majority vote, that science does not have ultimate truth to offer but only hypotheses that take a contestable form (I predict that x if y), are to be constantly put to the severest tests and therefore always run the risk of being superseded (as the hitherto best effort to approximate the truthful picture) by improved conjectures that stand up more successfully to efforts at corroboration.
Especially in a politicised atmosphere, it is not unlikely that the best attempts at defending verisimilitude - the best approximation to truth - will not draw the largest number of supporters and perhaps be a bitterly lonesome or even dangerous pursuit.
When the Nazis boasted that the community of non-Jewish German scientists formed a consensus of disagreement vis-à-vis Einstein's physics, Einstein said: all he required to accept refutation was just one man, who would falsify his theories. Of course, Einstein was a genuine scientist who was careful to state his theoretical predictions in such a way that they could be falsified, and he would have been happy to go on searching for truth on a new basis of evidence if he were to be proven wrong.
By contrast, as a dogmatic democrat Gore resorts to the crude logic of those believing in democracy as in a fetish: If 51% of the population decide to kill the remaining 49% - that is a good and legitimate decision.
Broad sections of the population are thoughtless enough to believe in this pattern of validation, and politicians relish the populace's gullibility underlying this primitive and totalitarian practice of democratic "verification".
Poor Old Gore, not content that media coverage has been massively biased in favour of his lies, he wants to shore up his regrettable advantage by restricting the freedom of expression of dissenting voices.
This is the way the great narratives of contemporary Western politics go: We are so right (read: in command of the instruments shaping public opinion), say their proponents, it just stands to reason to make dissenters shut up ( see the war on "terrorism", see the war on "climate change", as if the climate had any other business than changing.)
Manipulators like Gore are frighteningly successful, notwithstanding growing insight into the untruthfulness of their contentions.
We are already well into spending billions, interfering with the way people are allowed to conduct themselves and distorting the economy - all based on demonstrably erroneous assumptions:
CO2 is quite simply irrelevant to global warming (which in itself is unproblematic, and if anything: rather a gift to us, though it may unfortunately already be on the wane).
Gore's central thesis is the reverse of what the best evidence suggests: global warming is causing higher levels of CO2, not the other way around, as Gore wrongly claims.
Even if we maintained Gore's mistaken assumption about CO2 causing global warming, we should recognise that man-made CO2 is so negligible compared to other sources of CO2 (vulcanos, rotting vegetation and oceanic vapour) as to make efforts at reducing anthropogenic emissions irrelevant.
The detrimental greenhouse effect specified and predicted by hundreds of computer models is not borne out by empirical evidence, while there are indications that a cooling has taken place in the relevant strata of the atmosphere rather than the disingenuously hyped dramatic warming.
In a word: there are simply no grounds to be alarmed the way we are, and by extension, it is ludicrous to take "precautionary" action as we do.
Yet, politics and the public consensus continue to be firmly based on Al Gore's assumption of a "flat earth".
NBC's Meredith Viera asked Gore, "You know, you share the prize with scientists from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And one of those scientists, John Christy, wrote an op-ed last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal in which he criticized your dire predictions about the impact of global warming. He wrote, 'I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.'"
Gore immediately responded, "Well, he's an outlier. He no longer belongs to the IPCC. And he is way outside the scientific consensus."
Gore then attacked the news media directly, saying that "part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the 'on the one hand, on the other hand' approach. There are still people who believe that the earth is flat. But when you're reporting on a story like the one you're covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don't search out for someone who still believes the earth is flat and give them equal time."
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