If it weren’t for scandal, what a cold, heartless world this would be.  Might even counteract some of that Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever they call it.  And right now, there are some people feeling the heat on this one.

All right, enough bad puns.  But everyone’s favorite bit of the moment is the flap over Climate (capital C) researcher Phil Jones’ hacked emails, many of which are being claimed by Big C skeptics as containing evidence of doctored results.  The Guardian issued an editorial alleging fanaticism by so-called Climate Change Deniers (the reference to Holocaust Deniers is not lost on those capable of sapient thought, by the way), and quoting Green (capital G) economist Nick Stern at length, to wit: “”If they are muddled and confused, they do not have the right to be described as anything other than muddled and confused.” 

Ah.  Confusion, eh?  Well, the Climate folks have no-one but themselves to blame.  But it doesn’t look too great, when you look at it.  Sidestepping, for a moment, the fact that Prof. Jones had his personal files rifled and his private correspondence outed in a highly unethical and possibly illegal way, there remains the fact that the genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle, and the response is one of indignation and openly gainsaying the questions this situation raises, without engaging any of them in anything like a rational way.  If there’s been an implication made that the results of a scientific study are being nudged or falsified to produce a desired political effect, I think it ought to be directly explained and addressed.  I don’t think it will happen, of course – the whole thing will dissolve into pandemonium and will soon be swept under the carpet amid the run up to the next round of treaty talks as we organize to fight the global threat of… whatever.

The New York Times was a little more level-headed, thankfully, and gave a much better assessment: simply shouting down your opponents is not the same as refuting them.  “Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages,” writes Times editorialist John Tierney on December 1, “as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists.”

Precisely.  As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say that the scientists’ agendas are even more dangerous than those of their opponents, because they are cloaking them in the mantle of scientific irrefutability.  Science, as such, is seen as a monolithic truth, unsassailable and undebatable.  But Scientists are still human beings, and they still succumb to the same pressures as the rest of us, and that amplifies the importance of seeing to it that they are held to the same standard as the rest of us.  Falsification, fabrication, tweaking or fudging, whatever really is the case here, to me it goes to show that there simply is no substitute for real, actual, open debate.  It is the death of our faith in an open society that is allowing this kind of thing to go on; which is fostering, in fact, a mentality at all levels that the ends justify the means, and that it’s okay to lie if your intentions are good.

A friend of mine recently asked me what I thought about Climate Change.  Though he assumed my argument would be largely economic, what I told him was that I thought it was being used as a cover for a kind of neo-fascism, which I think surprised him.  But honestly, look at it.  Private property under state control.  A bureaucratic-scientific complex that claims authority to govern from a scientific theory.  A publicly-promulgated theory of imminent social collapse that can only be averted by submission to a mass movement.  And on, and on, and on.  I find the whole thing terrifying, and yes, even I cannot help but be frightened by Green propaganda.  Just look at the offerings in what passes for our arts culture these days: films, books, newspapers and magazines are all obsessed with doom, disaster and the end of times, and the solution is always, always, a single charismatic hero, who leaves the deniers to suffer and delivers the believers to their destiny.  The prospect of a manmade end to civilization does frighten me, but the end that’s really the danger right now is not that we’ll destroy our planet, but that this pseudo-science/pseudo-religion will become the excuse to dismantle what’s left of two centuries of progress towards liberty and human freedom.

I grew up in the last years of the Cold War, when words like freedom and liberty weren’t as kitschy as they are today, and when they actually meant what they said, at least to me.  Now liberty is a word that’s almost totally fallen out of fashion – I can’t even say it here without sounding like some kind of a flag-waving reactionary!  Freedom usually means freedom to choose what bar to head to on Friday nights.  Freedom is something to be handed out, or restricted, or regulated.  Everything is adversarial and combattive: it’s us versus them!  And when backed up by supposed scientific certitude, the tidal wave of “social change” threatens to engulf us all.  If you oppose it, it means you “fear change” or need to be “educated.”  I can’t be the only one who finds this frame of mind unbearably terrifying.

I mean, these Climate Researchers are obviously just as capable of bending reality as the rest of us, so what’s to say they aren’t doing it at any particular time, or even all the time?  I see studies presented as faits-accomplis, but I’m certainly not clear on how their experiments are being structured, how they are controlled, and by what means the hypotheses they are testing are confirmed or modified.  And even so, I question, at the very bottom of this entire environmental debate, whether any scientific theory is sufficient reason to impose systems of social control that will restrict and limit the cause of human liberty.  It strikes me, in the end, as science untempered by philosophy, and history has taught us time and again that that is a recipe for disaster.  Has our faith in democracy fallen so far that we no longer trust it, even when it has delivered the West from disasters that in earlier ages brought empires to their knees?  Does this culture really value humanity so little that it sees its highest ideals as an obstacle?  Do you really think that the planet can be managed like some kind of machine?

To sum it all up, let me phrase one question I’ve put to leftists and environmentalists repeatedly over the past ten years.  Say all of these changes and agendas, all the scientific theories, the management, the studies, the whole apparatus of the new social order; say someone put it all together, and assembled a plan, and put it to a vote.

What if the vote were a “NO?”

In ten years, I have never received a satisfactory answer to that question.