Did anyone else take notice when the famed New York Times just published its first column by Bret Stephens, the former Wall Street Journal columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, recently hired as a "conservative" voice.
Imagine that a "conservative" voice at the NYT. What is the world coming to? The rest of his "journalistic" comrades became totally unhinged.
So, of all the potential topics to choose from, Bret Stephens chooses
Climate Change sprinkled with politics from the recent election. Talk about courage! Anyone think his new colleagues would give him a chance to get settled? No way. It runs counter to their religion.
In case you have not noticed, mainstream media defines religious fundamentalism in America. The are the mouthpiece and loudspeakers of religious demagoguery.
Take a look at what he said ...
Quote:
Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.
Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?
Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.
Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.
By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”
Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.
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I would have printed some of the "professional" replies to Stephens' first article, but for the most part they were unprintable, even here on the Alt-Left forum of LCD.
But if you are interested you can read an article at
News Busters for yourself, not that it would make any difference for their fundamentalist followers.