Mark Steyn’s Stand Against Climate Alarmism: In-Depth with the Climate Crybully Conniption-Inducer

so millions of dollars in both litigation fees and damages aside what are the stakes of your case versus dr. Michael Eman well I think it's one of the most consequential the most consequential free speech case in the last half century if in the event that I were to lose I'd appeal it to the Supreme Court because I think that's the stakes we would essentially be in a world where juries courts but not just judges but juries would be litigating science no court anywhere in the common law world has been asked to rule upon the validity of a scientific hypothesis and for American courts to start doing that would be a disaster for the for the field of science but beyond that it's a matter of public policy climate change matters not so much because of what some guy with ice cause is doing in Finland it matters because the government is presuming to tax us and regulate us and make changes to the economy and that makes it a matter of public policy and if if matters of public policy can be dragged into courtrooms and decided by juries then there is no First Amendment it's not much of a First Amendment as it is if you can be put through a court process lasting half a decade and spend a seven-figure sum to discover that you're legally entitled to make a one hundred and twenty word blog post I mean that's two very faint cheers for the First Amendment but if in effect we were to enter a world where public policy can be litigated in courtrooms then there is no First Amendment at all and of course you escaped Canada to try to avoid that sort of system but it isn't working out too well I guess no I underwent a similar process in care I was a my writing was attacked as being flagrantly Islamophobic and free human rights complaints on the grounds of hate speech were made and they're they're serious things had that I lost the case in British Columbia would have been a de facto lifetime publication ban in my own country and I always thought you know when I'd attend court in Vancouver I remember at the end of that week-long trial flying back to Montreal a long-haul flight and gotten to Montreal got into my car and crossed at the tiny little border crossing of Derby Line Vermont to re-enter the land of the First Amendment land of the free and the guy said what was your business in Canada I said I was on trial at the Robson Street courthouse in Vancouver for crimes against humanity he goes oh well welcome back to America and and I did feel you know wow I'm just breathing the freedom and the First Amendment and the absolute this is the difference between the rest of the english-speaking world and the United States is there's an constitutional absolute right to free expression but that's of limited value if you in a litigious society where people can tie you up in court for five to ten years and it's and it's of even less value if you actually lose the spirit of vigorous public discourse and that's my concern to that on climate change and many other issues there's no point in having absolute freedom of speech if as a practical matter public discourse shrivels to an ever narrower range of opinion as it has on on climate and other subjects which is of course antithetical to scientific inquiry in the first place and you've written that in your case the process really is the punishment you know there's a chilling of anyone who challenges conventional wisdom on this why is it that the you know the orthodoxy in the scientific community has to either basically attack or even go into court and litigate against someone like you who challenges their position well I think at a certain level we have a much more homogeneous science world than we did in the 19th century so I mean people talk about the people talk about this relationship between science and government as if it's an entirely natural thing but it wasn't 200 years ago and and the 19th century lest we forget was the age of invention it was it was the century that set us up for the 20th century and in a strange way we're kind of running on the fumes of the 19th century's great age of invention what was shocking to me which I didn't really understand until I got immersed in this case was the what I call the climate of fear in climate science where with the exception of people who are at the very end of their careers they're the professor emeritus skies they're the genuine Nobel laureates they're people who are sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently venerable that they can afford to speak up against this but for people young people and middle-aged people the pressure to conform in in climate science is very real and the hostility to those who step out a line is absolutely extraordinary the viciousness and the and the hostility that's shown toward them is it's like nothing I mean I've spent all my life around the theater for example now showbiz people are as [ __ ] and catty and clawing each other and getting at each other and they're competitive and you know you've got all these showbiz say it's not important that I succeed only that my best friends fail and although that's the world I knew and it's nothing absolutely nothing compared to the way it is in in climate science and that's been incredibly damaging for the integrity not just of climate science but of science as a whole your testimony in front of the Senate I believe last year you drew a very interesting parallel and you sort of turned the logic of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on its head and Senator Whitehouse is threatening to use Rico laws against the oil companies who fund research that climate scientists like dr. michael mann don't like and what you argued was actually it's the scientific community that resembles a racket not those who are debating against them explain that yeah we had an example of that at I think it was George Mason University where a group of climate scientists actually wrote to the Attorney General to demand that he he bring these prosecutions against dissidents as they saw it these are scientists who sign these this letter it's quite it's quite outrageous and in fact it subsequently emerged a couple of weeks later that the the head guy had a sideline going in a so-called nonprofit foundation that had received gazillions of dollars in funding from various US agencies in return for which he made his wife a vice-president of the the the the scientific foundation and his daughter as its chief operating officer and all the rest of it and in fact it's it is the they operate in the same way as the the stevedores Union does in the classic Elia Kazan film on the waterfront in which they enforce ruthlessly enforce this omerta this code of silence where everybody is D and D deaf and dumb as they as they say down on the waterfront and that's assent they're essentially big climate Godfather's who don't want anybody to step out of line and when you have people like Leonard Benson is a very distinguished Swedish climatologist and he made the mistake of accepting an invitation from Nigel Lawson's global warming Foundation in London Nigel Lawson was chancellor of the exchequer the Finance Minister and mrs. Thatcher's ministry he's not a crazy guy he's a minister of the crown everybody on his board is members of the House of Lords and former ministers of this and secretaries of that there's a former private secretary to the Queen they're all them initely respectable eminently respectable but it was not possible for the big climate enforces to allow a Swedish climatologist to get mixed up but seen because they're worried is that you let him do it others are going to do it and then the dam cracks and the uniformity the rock-solid ruthlessly enforced compliance will crumble away and I have a very profound respect after these last few years for people like Judith Currie who was the head of Earth Sciences down at Georgia Tech and she is one of the most eminent female scientists in her field and she actually changed her mind and she became disgusted after the revelation of the Climategate emails at the way the global warming debate at the way these guys had a hammerlock on peer review phil jones at east anglia peer reviewed Michael Mann at Penn State and Michael Mann peer reviewed Phil Jones that the the racket is like almost pitiful Michael Mann gets filled Jones some fellowship with some American scientific body as a little back scratch and then asks Phil if if he can get Mike something at the Royal Society whatever it's like this is this is this is what they this is what they've reduced if she became disgusted Judith courier this and changed her mind the vitriol with which she's attacked the misogyny of this little climate cabal is is quite extraordinary Michael Mann who the guy created the global-warming hockey stick he'd linked to this post arguing in all seriousness that Judith Carey was was sleeping with me this is this is this is the way one respected scientist deals with another respected scientist so if you're a female scientist and you disagree they call you a [ __ ] you're a [ __ ] for big oil they use all these porno terms for the female scientists if you're upwards of 67 68 they say oh clearly he's senile he was okay back in the 60s and 70s but he's lost it now he's seen her and if you're young if you're young they absolutely will destroy you and crow by you and I have I have strangers paper I have a respect for people who don't particularly care for me don't like me don't want to be associated me but for people who do no more than talk to both sides like in a Welsh scientist temps in Edwards for example you know she got brutally slapped down by Michael Mann just because she doesn't write off anyone who isn't in 100% agreement something is sick actually sand and I make I make another point I sort of made a jocular reference to it earlier that when people say you know if you're if you're not a scientist they say well you can't comment about that if you're a physicist they say well that's not climate science so you can't comment climate climate science is an interdisciplinary field it involves all kinds of things it used to be a branch of physical geography now it's really a type of computer modeling but you've got all kinds of people putting input into that you've got a one end you've got the dendrochronology who are out there taking the tree rings and at the other end you've got statisticians who are the guys who know about how you weight the tree rings against the ice cores and against the temperature record and all and the minute these nutty activists say oh well you know he's he's just a statistician that's nothing to do with climate sir that this idea that climate science every scientific field is interconnected the idea that climate science uniquely is hermetically sealed off from every other scientific discipline is completely deranged and yet that's the case they make the climate scientists are of course the ones who are fudging the data very transparently right way time you've likened the environment of us crowd that pro climate disruption crowd I like to call it climate disruption because it was global warming global cooling climate change now disruption you've liken them to basically being akin to Islamic supremacists that they want to impose their vision on the world you know what is the end game for the climate alarmist crowd well I think there is an I think at the extreme end there is a actual hatred of humanity and those are the people who say well there's seven billion people on the planet and our maximum carrying capacity should only be two billion so therefore we have to figure out a way how to persuade the other five billion to go out of business and add a slightly less insane level but related to that those who who are anti the developed world in the sense that if you're picking which two billion people are allowed to survive they point out that someone who's born in Somalia has a carbon footprint that's only a twentieth the size of someone who's born in Sweden or someone who's born in Canada so therefore it's the Western world that needs to to put itself out of business what Roger Kimble quoted someone at the start of business here today who said that they were actually in the d-- development of that's that's the word they use the aggressive well it's by which they mean by progressive is returning us to some heed any state now I don't particularly if you were if you were to whine back the clock to before the Industrial Revolution there's lots of bits of that that of that world that I would quite like and I would be I myself would would be interested in living in that world but the idea that a bunch of people who've done six-year bachelor's degrees in environmentalism studies courses could survive even if you wound up even if you had like an EMP attack and we all the computers were wiped out and the planes dropped from the skies and the cars cease to function and we went back a hundred and fifty where we went back to say jacksonian america the difference in jacksonian america is that every able-bodied guy knew knows how to build a log cabin they know how to chop down a tree they know how to frame a house they know how to put a door in the house they know how to what the pitch of the roof should be and they know how to shingle a roof and the idea that the beneficiaries of the most pampered extended adolescence in the history of mankind would suddenly be at ease in that world it's absolutely ridiculous and i sometimes in my more Lyrid fantasies you know when you everyone thinks it'll be great everyone thinks it'll be like whatever that raquel welsh film from the sixties is where she's running around in a fur trim Vicki well you couldn't have the fur trim bikini now because it's bad to wear animal pelts so Raquel Welsh would be running around new the film would be even better but the idea that the idea that these people that this generation would be able to live for a minute in that world essentially we have two competing views of primitivism fighting for supremacy in our world both of them hate the Western developed world the the environmental crowd think it's a great evil so do the Sharia crowd and once every so often these conflicting models of primitivism interact earth our you know our this ridiculous thing every year where they turn off the lights for an hour on a Saturday evening and you pretend you're doing something to save the planet by sitting in the dark for an hour in Sweden Swedish town a couple of weeks ago they had to cancel Earth Hour because they've taken in so many so-called refugees that it's unsafe to switch the lights off for an hour because the the the hot Scandinavian blondes are going to be feeling a lot of unwanted attention as they're wandering around an entirely darkened Swedish town for 60 minutes and that's fascinating to me that's the two different models of primitivism two groups that most hate the modern Western world and want to destroy it and have competing models of primitivism and and and the soft delusional utopian primitivism of Western environmentalists when it came up against the hard serious face of hardcore Islamic primitivism they are found in Sweden the hardcore guys there primitivism model one out because they mean it and the soft sappy deluded middle-aged Western students don't so in other words Islamic supremacists will save us from the environmentalist crowd I hope it doesn't come to that if it were to be that I'd be looking for a neither of the above box on somewhere on the forum I'll ask two more brief questions you've been very generous with your time one is in your concluding testimony in from that Senate subcommittee you spoke about a play the great immensity and you compared it to habiba and the king if I'm pronouncing that correctly and you drew a parallel between them I was wondering if you could explain that parallel and also just comment that I actually saw the great immensity accidentally and I as you'll explain it was funded with some something on the magnitude of $700,000 in taxpayer funds and I literally thought that it was a parody of the climate alarmists crowd because it was so bad and so insane explain it yes it was a is essentially a everyone thinks of putting money into trying to save the planet ameliorating the trying to reverse climate change by reversing the global thermostat is in is insane it's like throwing money down down a hole and yet fortune is spent on it and I had no idea just how absurd the amounts of money being spent on it were until I discovered that the United States government which means me and you had paid to create a climate change musical you can you can that the one thing we know for certain is that if you just want to lose money you should sink it into a Broadway musical so if you don't like the if you don't like the 19 trillion dollars of public debt right now if you want to lose even more money they should they should sink the next 10 trillion dollars into developing new musicals that be as complete a waste of money as anybody can ever do so they came up with this this government musical and nobody finds it nobody finds it odd that it's essentially a propaganda exercise we look at Soviet propaganda posters and Soviet propaganda from the 1930s and we laugh at it we laugh at those boobs for putting up with it after the Communists took over Eastern Europe in Hungary they loved Hungarian operetta they loved friends lahar and kalman they loved the merry widow and the count of Luxembourg but these were all ideologically unsound because they involved a countess who falls in love with the serving boy or a prince who is who the romances of a prince so these you couldn't have all these singing counts and countesses and princes what have you in operate but people still loved operetta so the Communists created an operator called the state department store which is not what a Broadway producer would regard as a hit title the state department store played throughout Eastern Europe and we laugh at that because we think it's I did the idea of an ideologically conformist operetta is patently absurd 70 years later American taxpayers sink their money into an ideologically conforming musical about climate change and I compared it with zabibi and the king which was sad and Hasan wrote a romantic novel the the old joke was that he didn't actually type it himself he dictated it because he was a great dictator that was the joke and uh and so sad emerges I wrote this novel as a Bieber and the King which is about a beautiful woman called Z Bieber and this cruel but just King and obviously you know the undulating curves of Zoo Bieber's lush right body represent Iraq and the king represents Adam Hussein and they turned this into a musical which played in Baghdad never played Broadway never played the West End but it was like the cats of Baghdad and amazingly enough when Saddam Hussein writes a musical it gets great reviews it was two thumbs up from all the Baghdad critics and again we laugh at that and we're doing the same thing we're doing the same thing and and I was this state ideology I don't like I don't like it I don't care whether it's communism I don't care whether it's fascism and I don't care whether it's the fluffiest stuff like environmentalism if you've got a state ism you're in you're in big trouble there should not be a state ideology backed by taxpayer dollars it's a repulsive notion and the failure of that show every every American if we still had like I think Joan Baez or some we were conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War and they used to deduct from their taxes what they thought was going to support the American war machine I wish we didn't have such a powerful IRS because I'd like conscientious objectors to withdraw the whatever it was one buck eighty-seven that each of us had to pay to state just to stick government money in the climate-change musical if you were to have a megaphone and you could speak to the American public broadly what would be your message on climate change in general and carbon dioxide in particular well my message is a simple one that we we are enjoying the blessings of good times the Little Ice Age which is the period that preceded ours and ended at the beginning of the 19th century was a grim time life was poorer life was meaner the development of the United States and the development of Canada were greatly advanced by our emergence from the Little Ice Age it has been a period of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity for people around the world more and more people around the world if you look at people in in people in in India now in the Indian middle classes now enjoy the lifestyle the the economic status of southern Europe in the 1950s and 60s in other words the benefits of better health better economic unit opportunity a big extended in this period - more and more people around the planet people live in freedom they have the right to vote for their own governments responsible government in the British Empire began in Nova Scotia in 1848 it would not have been possible in 1748 it was simply too cold there would have been too few people you would not have been able to organize society on that basis this idea that this is the the temperature since the mid 19th century is somehow bad for the world is actually insane it has been the age of mass liberty and that would not have been possible in large parts it's certainly not possible Scandinavia in northern Europe in in Canada and other places without that so we should we actually should celebrate the emergence from the Little Ice Age and the idea that we demonize it is a kind of madness and it's a madness that it has been embraced by the people who've benefited from it most you know people who get twenty million dollars to star in some crappy motion picture that takes up a few days of their time and they somehow don't understand that they're at the very apex of a system that is enabled that and of a world that has come into being since the emergence from the Little Ice Age it's bizarre and we should laugh at thee we should laugh at these people and we should celebrate warmth and fear a return to the Little Ice Age you

Channel: The New Criterion

Views: 363,782

Keywords: Climate, Mark Steyn, First Amendment, Free Speech, Carbon Dioxide, Conservatism, Politics, Global Warming, Climate Change, Liberty, Interview, Science, Progressivism, CO2 Coalition, New Criterion

Id: L7wQp0Ir5Vc

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2016