View all Articles
Commentary By Oren Cass

Who's The Denier Now?

Energy Climate

Climate apocalypticism ignores the science

The epithet "climate denier," intended to invoke Holocaust denial, has always been tasteless and inapt. Climate change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the accuracy and predictive power of a scientific model like questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. But climate activists delighted in defining their opposition this way, with help from prominent figures such as Barack Obama, who in 2014 used Twitter to condemn "climate change deniers" and promote a website, run by Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America), that featured large black-and-white pictures of then–House speaker John Boehner and Senator Marco Rubio atop a green "Climate Change Deniers" banner. "On climate," asked the site’s headline, "whose side are you on?"

For a while, this seemed to work. Framing the climate debate as one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akin to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything. To the casual observer, even the most egregious exaggeration about climate science could seem reasonable compared with its outright rejection. Thus, Obama’s assertion in his 2015 State of the Union address that "no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change" became widely accepted. When Senator Bernie Sanders warned during a presidential debate that "the scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change . . . the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable," he was not laughed off the stage.

Read the entire piece here in the May 1, 2017 Issue of National Review

______________________

Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in National Review