These 20 Scientists Want to Make it A Crime to Disagree with Them
I think it is important to publicize these names far and wide:
- Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
- Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
- Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
- William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
- Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
- T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
- Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
- Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL
- Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX
- Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
- Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY
- Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
- Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT
These 20 people, who nominally call themselves "scientists", have written a letter to President Obama urging him to use the RICO statute to prosecute people who disagree with them on climate science, essentially putting scientific disagreement in the same status as organized crime. If they can't win the scientific debate with persuasion, they will win it with guns. From the letter:
One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.
Of course "deceive the American people" is defined by these folks in practice as "disagreeing with us".
alanstorm:
"If they can't win the scientific debate with persuasion, they will win it with guns."
IOW, typical "liberals".
September 21, 2015, 11:11 amNehemiah:
This angers me to no end. How about they collect some facts that support their contention that the earth is dramatically warming due to man.
September 21, 2015, 12:06 pmmorganovich:
ahh, i miss the good old days when you could have people tortured to death for heresy if they denied the existence of celestial spheres and tossed out crackpot notions like the earth revolving around the sun instead of being the center of the universe.
it's nice to see science getting back to its roots.
September 21, 2015, 1:30 pmWhat the...:
Forget the history, they don't want to defend their presumption of a positive feedback loop that is the basis for their alarmist future warming predictions. They want to shut down all discussion of their ability to predict the future and to have people just accept that a complex multi-variate system can be boiled down to the amount of a single variable - CO2. Just wonderful - I guess this is what happens when a bunch of people who have been always told they are special and brilliant have to respond to criticism - they make criticism illegal.
September 21, 2015, 1:44 pmErikEssig:
Disgusting. But important to name names here. The extremist are getting more extreme.
September 21, 2015, 2:41 pmArrian:
You know, I always hated it when liberals or atheists compare scientists with Galileo or skeptics with the Pope who put him under house arrest. After all, it wasn't his science that got Galileo in trouble, he got in trouble because he was an arrogant fame seeker who tried to play at politics for his own aggrandizement, got in way over his head and got burned by the pros. Not only that, he was wrong about the science: Not accepting Copernicus's elliptical orbits but insisting on perfect circles with retrograde motions.
I'm beginning to come around to the idea of comparing scientists like this to Galileo now.
September 21, 2015, 2:44 pmErikTheRed:
Hmmm... seems like the folks in George Mason's crimatology department should hang out with the folks in econ more...
September 21, 2015, 3:26 pmWulf2000:
Lysenkoism is alive and well among the so called climate "scientists". As I recall, there was an Austrian music professor at the University of Graz who wanted the death penalty for opponents of the IPCC dogma. Stupidity has finally struck climate hucksters.
September 21, 2015, 3:47 pmobloodyhell:
The sheer abuse of the RICO statutes to go after stuff that was blatantly and clearly NOT what they were supposed to be about -- not just on this but on an array of almost as egregious items -- is enough to call for their complete and total repeal.
September 21, 2015, 4:54 pmobloodyhell:
That's not science. That's religion.
And yup.... just checked the label.... Climate change is now a religion.
September 21, 2015, 4:55 pmobloodyhell:
Note enough to name names. Time to call for some expulsions for cause. Treason against the American people -- an effort to directly deny them their right to free speech in a manner of collusion and conspiracy -- should be sufficient.
You want to extol the power to go after people who disagree with you, you fucks?
September 21, 2015, 4:59 pmI'll get down with that -- let's start by taking away all your $%^$%^#$% jobs.
obloodyhell:
These 20 "Scientists" Want to Make it A Crime to Disagree with Them
You missed the quote marks. I added them fer ya.
September 21, 2015, 5:00 pmobloodyhell:
Started a petition to get their resignations. Share it far and wide
https://www.change.org/p/the-presidents-of-their-respective-universities-call-for-the-resignation-of-scientists-who-want-to-criminalize-disagreement-with-them?recruiter=63209398&utm_source=share_for_starters&utm_medium=copyLink
No, this is not the same as criminalizing the behavior of someone who disagrees with me. They are attempting to claim by position of authority the right and power to say that anyone who disagrees with THEM is a criminal and should be placed in jail.
*I* am merely calling attention to the fact that that effort demonstrates that none of them are sufficiently competent to be researchers in ANYTHING, regardless of their paperwork history. They are not, and likely never have been, men of SCIENCE. And I'm not attempting to throw them in jail. I'm aiming to get them fired from jobs they clearly are not qualified to hold by failing to understand what SCIENCE even is.
September 21, 2015, 5:34 pmrandom geek:
Or, how about we make a special exception in this case. Deceiving the public is a crime. Now, they must prove that they are correct, based on their own science, or wind up in jail for that same deceit.
Except I hate to grant the point at all that jail is appropriate for somebody being wrong. I just wish that they had to be subject to their own standards.
September 21, 2015, 5:52 pmAndrew_M_Garland:
With respects to Mao Tse Tung, "Scientific truth in a collective society flows from the barrel of a gun."
September 21, 2015, 6:07 pmmlhouse:
Funny how people protected by tenure want dissenting voices treated.
September 21, 2015, 6:11 pmJW:
20 climate apparatchiks.
Any scientist with solid facts and conclusions wouldn't need to abuse state power by threatening to violently imprison dissidents, in order to get those conclusions to stand up to scrutiny.
September 21, 2015, 8:22 pmDaniel Barger:
The downside to free speech......they are free to call for criminalizing the desire for proof.
September 21, 2015, 11:35 pmI say we criminalize them.....and make their conduct a capital crime. 20 names to go on the
list of those needing hanging once the festivities commence. If they can call for those who
insist on proof to be imprisoned then it is perfectly acceptable for us to call on them to be
hung for propagating their lies.
tex:
To my knowledge nothing in the history of science has so destroyed the credibility of attaching “Science” to some pronouncement as what the “Climate Scientists” have done.
September 22, 2015, 7:48 amterrence:
I just signed it; but it has a long way to go...
September 22, 2015, 11:47 amjdgalt:
Since these 20 want to use force (by means of government) to silence their opponents, it seems to me that they have exposed themselves to a well merited RICO lawsuit. Perhaps the people who recently whipped Michael Mann will file it and get rich.
Oh, and these 20 might want to re-enroll in Logic 101. "Shut up or we'll use force" is not even valid logical argument, much less science.
September 22, 2015, 5:56 pmjdgalt:
All use of RICO is abuse. The statute seizes property first and asks questions later. That isn't due process.
September 22, 2015, 6:01 pmjdgalt:
There's a difference between being mistaken and fraud. So in effect, they're asserting that all their opponents are liars. That's a lie on their part. I wouldn't mind if they went to prison for it.
September 22, 2015, 6:06 pmjhertzli:
They will next call for investigating the GMU economics department for possible involvement in illegal gambling.
September 24, 2015, 4:08 amjhertzli:
The people in favor of this lawsuit assume that the "climate deniers" are obeying their corporate masters and if the Forces of Light can shut down those corporate masters, the "climate denier" movement will vanish.
September 24, 2015, 4:09 amArrian:
Yeah, I was surprised at the number of GMU folks here, since their Econ and at least of their Law schools are so vocally libertarian.
September 25, 2015, 10:14 amDaublin:
The link is dead as of today. I wonder if it was retracted, or if the URL is just wrong.
On the original topic, I will say it's hard to know what to use the word "scientist" for. I don't think it's very accurate that professors are calling themselves scientists. Professors live a very conservative intellectual life, where they have to cite each other favorably in order to get ahead. Scientists, on the other hand, are supposed to question everything and to do experiments to try and break existing theories.
But the misuse of "scientist" is so widespread, it's becoming a non-useful word. People who use it in the sense of Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan would have liked are just outnumbered by people who are thinking more about James Hansen, Michael Mann, or Neil deGrasse Tyson.
September 27, 2015, 9:03 amJebTexas:
Here's what the link says now:
The letter that was inadvertently posted on this web site has been removed. It was decided
more than two years ago that the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) would
be dissolved when the projects then undertaken by IGES would be completed. All research
projects by IGES were completed in July 2015, and the IGES web site is in the process of
being decommissioned.
Gee, I guess having the public notice what you spew IS worse that the public ignoring you.
September 29, 2015, 8:01 pmMRGGPRI:
Actually these "scientists" are themselves clearly participating in a RICO scam that has been exposed time and time again in their doctored and blatantly false statistics they release to the public...
October 30, 2015, 10:45 am