Lies cloaked as science

Patrick Michaels is the co-author with Robert Balling of The Satanic Gases, an outstanding book on the politics of the global warming hoax. Both Michaels and Balling are bona fide climate experts whom Rocket Man and I tracked down to interview for an article we wrote on global warming about ten years ago.
This morning’s USA Today carries a column by Michaels on “The Day After Tomorrow,” Hollywood’s new contribution to the global warming hoax: “A lot of hot air.” Michaels summarizes and comments on the film’s premises:

Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a “superstorm.”
The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.
Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.

Michaels has the wit to place the film in the line of pseudo-scientific propaganda pioneered by “The China Syndrome,” Hollywood’s 1979 contribution to the campaign against nuclear energy, and by “The Day After,” Hollywood’s 1983 contribution to the nuclear-freeze movement.
“The Day After” masterfully served the Soviet Union’s propaganda campaign of the moment seeking to prevent the Reagan administration’s deployment of medium-range Pershing missiles in West Germany. The Pershing missiles were of course intended to counter the Soviet Union’s deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe. The Soviet Union whipped up a worldwide frenzy to deter the Reagan administration and its European allies.
It might be useful to remember in this context (courtesy of this BBC story) the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its tens of thousands of demonstrators who, as part of the 1983 frenzy, formed a human chain stretching 14 miles across a southern English county, lining a route along what the protesters called “Nuclear Valley” in Berkshire. The chain started at the American airbase at Greenham Common, passed the Aldermaston nuclear research center and ended at the ordnance factory in Burghfield. The lovely British actress Julie Christie joined in the festivities.
Michaels recalls that the purpose”The Day After” was to strengthen the nuclear-freeze movement, and that it failed. Michaels adds:

The Day After Tomorrow is only one more day than The Day After, and it deserves the same fate. Lies cloaked as science should never determine how we live our lives.

The lies to which Michaels refers are lies with a purpose. In 2004, it seems to me, Lenin’s useful idiots and the old Communist front groups continue to serve the party line with religious fervor. But if the party’s over, how can that be?

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses