Columbia salutes the Global Warming police

American democracy has its assets frozen
(Daily Mail, January 2014)

What happens when climate research exceeds sustainable levels... (Published at The Morningside Post, and quoted by Mark Steyn)

Last January, as the death toll of frozen Americans climbed to 21 amid 4,406 record cold temperatures across the U.S., the Weather Channel reassured its viewers that “no matter how low the temperature dropped in your area today, that doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening.”

Alas, one might have hoped that the billions of dollars the U.S. government spends on climate change research each year would have afforded us this minor detail – i.e. that global warming means cooling – a bit earlier in the game, such as before New York City began retrofitting its infrastructure and cutting its road salt stocks under the impression that “extreme cold events” were “expected to become rarer,” as the Columbia-backed 2009 NYC panel on Climate Change warned.  

This information also would have helped climate scientist Chris Turney last December when it was the Antarctic ice –instead of the science– that settled around his global warming research ship. It took a $2 million multi-national assistance force comprised of five ships and a helicopter to rescue him. As the Turney mission aptly put it: “We’re stuck in our own experiment.”

Unfortunately, the more the climate’s ironic feedback loops thwart the climate alarmists, the more the alarmists rely instead upon the positive feedback loops of groupthink to defend their dire hypotheses. They rely, in other words, on narrowing the range of acceptable public debate to the point that even alleged havens of free inquiry like Columbia University begin endorsing the unleashing of legal force against critics of publicly funded climate scientists. This past January, a federal court gave the green light to Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann’s legal proceedings against political humorist Mark Steyn of the National Review. Steyn, a Canadian immigrant to the U.S., is being prosecuted for the unlikely crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient.”

In July of 2012, Steyn, an immigrant to the U.S., made the mistake of buying into the hype about his adopted country’s “First Amendment” by weighing in on Penn State’s inquiry into allegations of Mann’s academic malpractice. The inquiry, which The Atlantic’s Clive Crook has called “difficult to parody” for its haste and sloppiness, was a response to leaked emails between Mann and fellow government-funded climate scientists discussing how best to “hide the decline” in 20^th century global temperatures revealed by their data samples. In a line reminiscent of Bridge-gate, Mann had replied to a fellow scientist’s email urging him and colleague Gene Wahl to delete all emails on the subject, with, “I'll contact Gene about this ASAP.” Marveling at Penn State’s complete exoneration – which had led some bloggers to call Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” – Steyn chided Mann’s “hockey stick” as “fraudulent,” and concluded, “Whether or not he’s ‘the Jerry Sandusky of climate change’, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.”

But before you jump to stand-down the multi-national forces from rescuing the ungrateful little immigrant from getting his assets as frozen as an Antarctic research team, consider that Columbia University itself is stuck in the same feedback loops of climate research. For in fact, named smack in the middle of Mann’s very legal suit as a “responsible” voice that has called Steyn’s comments “deplorable, if not unlawful” is the Journalism Review of the same Columbia that gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a respectable forum to announce there are no homosexuals in Iran and boasts a President who has written four books on the virtues of free speech. And just last week Columbia University Press gushed over its own client’s splendid lawsuit, announcing: “Michael Mann Takes on the National Review and Climate Change Skeptics.” Somewhere amid Morningside’s arctic breezes one can almost hear the muffled dying gasps, er, emissions, of a quaint principle: “I don’t agree with your making fun of a Nobel recipient, but I’ll defend your right to make fun of him.” 

I hesitate to note that despite claiming so in his very lawsuit, Mann has not won the Nobel prize. Or to be precise (to avoid a defamation lawsuit), “He has never won the Nobel prize,” according to the Nobel Committee. It’s a shame, because if Mann actually was a Nobel recipient, and if he were to win this case, we could all look forward to trapping many more journalists in their own experiments, starting with no less a defamer than Paul Krugman, who has called Friedrich Von Hayek – an actual Nobel recipient – a zombie, and was last seen calling cancer-stricken Senator Tom Coburn’s account of losing his doctor due to Obamacare a “garbage story.”

Indeed, with scientists at Russia’s Pulvoko Observatory now warning that we could be in for a centuries long ice age, much more worrisome than any climate feedback loops are the cultural feedback loops of mutually reinforcing group think that have made it fashionable for Columbia’s own media outlets to endorse the unleashing of government force against critics of public officials. Columbia Journalism Review and Columbia University Press owe an apology not just to Steyn, but to the entire student body, for depriving us of the essays and criticisms of writers who have felt the chill in the air and opted to let the ice settle in.