By Rick Manning
Some random philosophy professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology named Lawrence Torcello has decided that if you don’t agree with him on climate change, then you should be criminally prosecuted. Here is his actual quote in the UK journal, “The Conversation”, “We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent.”
An interesting position given that Torcello downgrades the number of scientists who are in agreement on climate change to “a majority.”
Given this premise, the President of the United States would need to be charged as criminally negligent as NASA scientist Dr. Roy Hubbard has expressed doubts about the conclusions of warmists attributing far more influence to the sun and its changing cycles for any short term warming rather than the anti-carbon mantra.
Or perhaps he is upset with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the warmist headquarters, which has been compelled to lower the bottom end of its estimated range of warming by half a degree Celsius.
Michael Mann, the hockey stick warmist guru, in a piece whining that those who don’t agree with him are distorting the evidence reports on the IPCC change as follows, “The IPCC reports a likely range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (roughly 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit) for this quantity, the lower end having been dropped from 2.0 degrees C in the fourth IPCC assessment. The lowering is based on one narrow line of evidence: the slowing of surface warming during the past decade.”
So, flat temperatures in the 2000s are already altering the predictive models the United Nations IPCC relies on to convince governments to issue carbon emissions restrictions. For a relationship—a doubling of CO2 emissions affecting global temperatures—that is supposed to rely on physics, the potential range of 3 degrees Celsius being the “likely” change in temperature leaves vast uncertainty.
But in the church of Global Warming, Bishop Torcello wants to lead an inquisition against those who differ in their analysis of the data in order to potentially “save the planet”. Maybe the IPCC will let the aptly named Torcello light the bonfires to burn scientific manuscripts that don’t conform to their accepted view of the world?
Of course, this manuscript burning is only a pre-cursor to giving those heretics who dare challenge his narrow view the Joan of Arc treatment themselves in the fires and ash of their burning underlying research. After all, the very moral authority of the recently convened Church of Global Warming itself is at stake.
While the “Torch of Rochester” claims otherwise, his odd view that competing dangerous views should not be able to be financed without penalty must make his fellow faculty members extremely uncomfortable. After all, his thoughts as a philosophy professor are financed at his private university haven. Should those who gave money to RIT be prosecuted because of Torcello’s wild musings?
Under “The Torch’s” standards, they should be, unless of course, they agree with whatever the fashionable eco-fascist theory of the day happens to be.
Normally, it would be wise to just dismiss this oddball professor as an anomaly, but we don’t live in normal times. At University campuses across North America the concept of inclusion, safe spaces, and civil rights have been trumping the free exchange of ideas for years.
Now, that “The Torch” has been let out of his cage one wonders how many blank-eyed minions will follow him in the belief that they have a freedom from dissenting thought. Thought which cannot be tolerated because it disrupts the on-going march toward the consensus enjoyed in totalitarian states across the globe.
For “The Torch” and his ilk the only way to “co-exist” and achieve true “inclusion” is to jail and exclude those who disagree.
Welcome to the new age of tolerance.
Rick Manning is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Rick on twitter @rmanning957.
