Een redelijk effectieve manier om voorstanders tegen te werken is het podium te ontnemen van ongewenste geluiden. Blijkbaar zijn er geen goede argumenten aanwezig, en laat niet iedereen zich hypnotiseren door mooie plaatjes van numerieke simulaties.
Christopher Monckton in ieder geval niet. Hij laat zich niet muilkorven.
“It is not often realized how much those of us who dare to question the Party Line are made to suffer, and how much is spent on making us suffer.
“To take one example, in October 2009 I made a speech in St Paul, Minneapolis, revealing in the peroration that the then draft Copenhagen climate treaty was proposing to establish a global ‘government’. The word ‘government’ actually appeared in the treaty draft. Someone at that well-attended talk filmed the last four minutes of my speech and posted it up on YouTube. Within a week, it had received some five million hits, spread across several YouTube channels. Then the hit-counters stopped rising. I had naively assumed that everyone who had wanted to hear me had heard me.
“Then I took a call from a professor at Texas A&M University, who said that the university’s monitoring had established that the speech would eventually have reached 20 million hits, but that someone had paid a lot of money to set up a dozen bogus pages full of gibberish, but tagged with ‘Monckton’ and related tags, to divert all traffic away from the genuine channel. I asked how it was that those pages had attracted more hits than the genuine page. The professor explained that the major search engines had been paid handsomely to prioritize the bogus pages over the genuine page. I asked how much that exercise had cost. The professor said the cost was, at minimum, $250,000, and probably a great deal more, just to silence one speech.
“It is significant, then, that the attorneys for two cities in the Sunstroke State decided that they could more easily impress the judge in the oil corporations’ case by making personal attacks on our reputations than by trying to answer the two scientific points we had raised: first, that the supposed scientific consensus amounted to no more than 0.5%, and secondly, that climate panic was based solely on a significant scientific error that we had recently discovered.
“It was by reputational attacks that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century established themselves and neutralized their opponents. It is by reputational attacks that the totalitarians of the 21st century seek to do the same. But the totalitarians of the 21st century have made the same mistakes as the totalitarians in the 20th. They have gotten the science wrong, wherefore whatever harm they try to do to us in the short term will rebound on them with heavy interest in the long. They have the money, the power and the glory, but we have the truth, and the truth will prevail.”
Environmentalism and its most extreme version, global warming alarmism, asks for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion and intervention into our lives and of government control over us.
Václav Klaus