Professor Proposes Dystopia Where Climate Deniers Bold Enough to Talk Face Incarceration

It’s All About Control

Ground crews around the country are battling permafrost for the upcoming baseball season, the Coast Guard is dealing with 30 inch ice on Lake Superior and another major snow storm just put Philadelphia over 67 inches of snow making this winter the second snowiest on record there while another major Nor’Easter appears to be shaping up. March certainly isn’t going out like a lamb and all of this is merely an exclamation point on the frigid cold from earlier in the season. From the snow in Cairo to the coldest football game ever played, the weather has not cooperated with the so-called AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) theory. AGW has a trail of failed predictions and years ago leaked emails revealed a massive effort to manipulate and control the science by AGW proponents. So it was already clear that AGW did not come from unbiased, objective truth-seeking scientists in their clean white lab coats. And their recruitment of Al Gore to shout-out the message further demonstrated AGW was about more than “just science.” Of course none of this necessarily means AGW is incorrect. It is possible that politics, abuse of science, manipulation and theoretical failures are just accidentally tainting what at the core is legitimate and thoughtful science. It does however reveal the dogmatic AGW truth claims for what they are. As the old saying goes, it’s not what they don’t know that scares me, but what they know for sure. AGW may well be true, it may be false, or it may be somewhere in between. We just don’t know for sure. But that’s the point—we don’t know, and what we need are thoughtful minds to come forward on this important issue. Instead AGW proponents are doubling down.

This month Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, asks the question, “Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?” Torcello’s use of the term “climate denial” foreshadows his answer. This question of climate change is too important and too complicated for such overreach, but for Torcello if you do not support AGW then you are in “climate denial” and if you talk about it then your next stop should be jail.

Torcello thinks the government should enact laws enabling the incarceration of climate denialists who, after all, are “not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life.” It is time for modern societies, Torcello concludes ominously, to “update their legal systems accordingly.”

Torcello’s concern for human life stands in contrast to his advocacy of the termination of unborn human beings, for elsewhere he “promotes completely the permissive position on abortion from conception to birth.” According to Torcello, murder of the unborn should be legal but questioning AGW should be illegal because, after all, it demonstrates a “willful disregard for human life.”

And does anyone believe that in such a perverse world the inquisition will stop with climate deniers? Certainly evolution denial is at least as dangerous.

While one would hope that Torcello is an academic anomaly, the fact is he is not alone and his new found interest in criminal justice will likely help to earn him tenure. There was, for example, University of Texas evolutionist Eric Pianka who advocated the elimination of 90% of the human population (deadly viruses were his weapons of choice) and received standing ovations, and an award from his peers at the Texas Academy of Science.

Religion drives science, and it matters.