Acts of Heroism in the Face of Recent Consensus Demands

 Jeffrey A. Tucker wrote a marvelous article: 

Jay Bhattacharya: A Rare Act of Heroism in the Pandemic Era

It is very much worth reading at Savvy Street, which is a publication website which is often worth reading.  The article is primarily a discussion of the absolute demand for consensus on the response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, despite the massive errors of that demanded response.  Those who stood against the tide lost badly in their careers, but fought the good fight heroically.

There is a parallel to this quote from the article that I will comment on below:

The popular press began to go after him savagely, smearing both the study and his motivations (this later became outright censorship). At this point, he began to realize the intensity of the campaign against dissent and the push for full unity in favor of the policy response. It was not like normal times when scientists could disagree. This was something different, something fully militarized, when a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” consensus was being demanded by every institution. That meant no heresies against orthodoxy were allowed.

The reaction to critics, such as myself, of catastrophic man-made global warming, now called vaguely and unscientifically climate change, was similar, though a bit longer in developing. There is a difference between being told we will all die in 10 years and being told we will all die in the next few months. Nonetheless, professors lost their jobs or lost their funding. Critics in industry lost contracts, other business, and promotions. All of the critics were accused of being on the take from the oil and gas industries, despite the fact that those industries turned tail quickly. Most of the active critics from academia became active only after they retired, but then many died within a few years, so their opposition was of brief duration.

Just as the consensus response to SARS-CoV-2 was in massive error, so too has been that of attributing to additions of atmospheric CO2 the power to bring on a catastrophe for mankind. The rapid saturation of the warming effects, ignoring cooling effects while exaggerating warming effects due to fundamental physics errors, manipulating the surface temperature record to warm it in the present and cool it in the past, ignoring the advantages of a warmer climate and of more plant nourishment from the atmosphere, claiming much greater increases in atmospheric CO2 than is likely, greatly over-estimating property damage due to rising oceans, falsely claiming severe weather events have and will increase, and even claiming that more people will die from heat while disregarding that fewer will die from cold -- these are some examples of the massive errors of those claiming a looming climate disaster due to the use of carbon-based fuels, concrete, and meats.