Global-warming alarmists try to freeze out skeptics.

ITEM: In the Boston Globe for December 21, 2006, U.S. Representative Marry Meehan (D-Mass.) and Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, wrote a piece called "Making Noise on Global Warming." The pair maintained: "There are few matters of international importance that could have more dire consequences than being silent about the dangers of global warming. Rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, an increase in severe weather, from hurricanes to heat waves--the effects of global warming are evident all around us.... Despite these troubling signs, government scientists and experts on climate change have been stopped by President Bush and administration officials from reporting their scientific findings on the link between global warming and human activity."

The authors concluded: "Instead of silencing government climate experts, the federal government should take a cue from states like Massachusetts and become an active leader and partner in efforts to combat global warming."

ITEM: BBC News reported on October 31, 2006: "The world cannot afford to wait before tackling climate change, the UK prime minister has warned. A report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%. But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says. Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was 'overwhelming' and its consequences 'disastrous.'"

ITEM: Former Vice President Al Gore, reported the Associated Press on December 17, "says there is a 'temptation' to suppress scientific findings that don't agree with policy and urges scientists to take a more active role in communicating research with the public. 'Earth science has been singled out' and ignored by government, particularly work dealing with climate change, he said." The wire-service account continued, as published in the Knoxville News Sentinel: "'There is a greater temptation to ignore inconvenient truths, to set aside knowledge that might challenge prevailing policy,' said Gore, who was greeted with a standing ovation."

CORRECTION: It is truly astonishing that the warmaholics who portend worldwide catastrophes around the next bend, and whose every alarmist warning is trumpeted by the mass media and echoed by major political spokesmen, can pretend they are the victims of a silencing campaign.

In fact, in the matter of global warming, muzzling and ridiculing are generally reserved I to the skeptical analysts who won't fall into lock step. Remember it was Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), both global-warming acolytes, who not long ago sent a letter to ExxonMobil's top executive strongly demanding that the company cease funding any group that doesn't buy into the latest global-warming theory. The letter's message was, as pointed out by the Wall Street Journal, "Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else."

Free speech and balance are apparently outmoded concepts for true believers of the faith of global warming. Consider one such outspoken promoter, Ross Gelbspan, an author with a long newspaper career with the Philadelphia Bulletin, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. It was Gelbspan who instructed an audience in the nation's capital: "Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what those scientists say."

In a similar vein is ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore, who told a conference of journalists in Vermont this past October, "I don't like the word 'balance' much at all" in global-warming coverage. He added that he felt "deep professional shame" in supposedly being manipulated by those who were skeptical. Reporting the views of such disbelievers, he maintained, saved us "from the trouble of having to check out the fact that these other sides were the proverbial Flat Earth Society."

Well, it seems Mr. Blakemore is mighty selective in his outrage. An October 30 news release issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works pointed out: "Blakemore said skeptics of global warming should be ignored because some of them are being funded by industry. But he has failed to note that scientists he promotes, such as James Hansen [and] Michael Oppenheimer, are both recipients of huge sums of money from environmental special-interest groups."

When Blakemore reported on January 29, 2006, that NASA scientist James Hansen was alleging that the Bush Administration was censoring his scientific work, he failed to inform viewers that Hansen had received a quarter of a million dollars from Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and subsequently endorsed her husband, Democrat John Kerry, for President in 2004." Moreover, continued the senator, "Michael Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of the group Environmental Defense."

This is not to say that Al Gore, for example, is wrong in his global-warming embellishing simply because he has been hired by the British government specifically to embellish global warming. But why should he or another paid propagandist be given a tree pass?

Lord Monckton, the Viscount of Brenchley, who was a policy advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, made just this point to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe. Why, he asked, should the Royal Society's complaints about industry funding be given particular credence? After all, the Royal Society's "long-standing funding by [British] taxpayers does not ensure any greater purity of motive or rigour of thought than industrial funding of scientists who dare to question whether 'climate change' will do any harm."

Indeed, he told the lawmakers, these attacks "acknowledge the effectiveness of the climate skeptics. In so doing, you pay a compliment to the courage of those free-thinking scientists who continue to research climate change independently despite the likelihood of refusal of publication in journals that have taken preconceived positions; the hate mail and vilification from ignorant environmentalists; and the threat of loss of tenure in institutions of learning which no longer make any pretense to uphold or cherish academic freedom."

The Stern Review, due soon in U.S. bookstores and mentioned above by the BBC, was written not by a scientist, but by a former economist of the World Bank; it could only reach its wild conclusions by grossly overstating even the worst of worst-case scenarios. It maintains that, unless drastic action is taken immediately, floods could displace 100 million people; melting glaciers may cause water shortages for one in six people worldwide; 40 percent of animal species could become extinct; and up to hundreds of millions of people might become "climate refugees." However, we are supposed to think those who have their doubts about these projections are extremists!

Monckton has been properly critical of the Stern Review and Al Gore for their many unwarranted assumptions. Lord Stern, he points out, went even beyond the hypotheses of the United Nations in his visions of impending doom. Yet, writes the viscount, even if the U.K. "were to close down completely, and were to cease altogether to use energy, operate industries or drive cars, the reduction in global temperature by 2035 would amount to 0.0006C. This negligible temperature saving would be more than outweighed by just a few years' further economic growth in the Kyoto-exempted, Nairobi-excused China, which already has 30,000 coal mines, opens a new coal mine every week and will continue to open a new coal-fired power station every five days until 2012. If global warming is a problem, the West, even acting collectively, can do nothing without the co-operation of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other fast-emerging fast-polluting economies."

The leading advocates of global warming know this, but they conveniently ignore it because changing the weather isn't what the global-warming push is about. Their goal is to use the global-warming issue to impose their utopian vision for the world. As French President Jacques Chirac openly boasted at The Hague in November 2000, Kyoto "represents the first component of an authentic global governance."