Stephens Scores A Safety

Bret Stephens has made it safe to be a skeptic again.

One of the sole voices on the mod-right who have been consistently anti-Trump, he kick-started his jump from the WSJ to the NYT by penning what amount to a plea for tolerance of mild skepticism toward climate change alarmism.  Even this was too much for the doctrinaire alarmists who began calling for a boycott of the Times.

[Just in case it needed to be explained: there is no comparison between calls for boycotting the NYT from those rightfully outraged by their recently providing a platform to convicted terrorist mass murderer Marwan Barghouti and eliding that fact, because they pretend that a system of absolutism [eliminationist anti-Semitic Palestinian nationalist terrorism] isn’t; plus, most of the calls for a boycott were from people who could afford to take the NYT out of their news diet, as many of them probably view it rightfully as having credibility problems in the first place.  On the other hand, as Stephens’ column actually does explode an absolutist viewpoint, when the knives came out, the knife wielders are the types who usually otherwise swear by every word in the NYT [unless they will solely rely on PuffPost and BSNBC from now on].  So those who proposed boycotts in the wake of the Barghouti piece are correct; the climate alarmist boycotters are simply being characteristically ridiculous.  Yes, I’m “certain” about that.  Boo hoo.]

In my next post I will further explain why Stephens’ approach might provide a perfect fulcrum to explode the all-encompassing absolutism behind hard left intersectionality and allow liberals to disengage from them.  But for now, we focus on one absolutism at a time, so that hopefully climate change alarmism will be discredited by a burden of proof so heavy that it would become impossible to carry out any aspect of its political program, forced to reveal its fringe radical absolutist agenda, and thereby reflexively eject itself from the mainstream of rational human discourse once it becomes recognized as the bastard offspring of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich that it truly is.

In Talmudic hermeneutics there is a principle employed called a “double doubt”, or more specifically: in determining “if X then Y, if Y then Z”—even if X applies, if Y is in doubt, Z will always be in doubt; surely, if no X, no Z. In the case of climate change alarmism and the demanded policy proscriptions, I will posit that said doubt isn’t double—it’s septuple.

The “doubts” stack up as follows: first, has there been a significant aggregate warming across the planet, and for how long; second, if there has been, will it inevitably continue; third, are its effects necessarily damaging and irrevocable; fourth, is all of this uniquely attributable to human activity, specifically the consumption of “fossil fuels”; and fifth, are the concomitant policy proscriptions technically/practically implementable; sixth, without—in contradistinction to Skinnerian doctrine—compromising freedom and dignity; finally, seventh—in a way that is ultimately not counterproductive on multiple levels?

Which leads me to my next Talmudically-derived principle, loosely translated: “when the defendant is in possession, the burden of the proof is upon the plaintiff when there is any doubt”.  Climate change alarmists raise two of their assertions to the level of moral axioms: one, “the system isn’t working and innocent people will suffer as a result — these are blazingly obvious points”, and two, “climate change is, at its base…more about money than about carbon… an environmental-justice issue, in which the rich nations of the world are inflicting damage on the poor ones.” The second statement especially quashes the proposition that questioning ACC as a “Marxist redistributionary conspiracy” is a reactionary trope, and instead reframes that charge as nothing more than a radical progressive canard.  Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate”  should put the lie to the notion that alarmists don’t simultaneously agitate for global economic redistribution, or even “planned economies”.

So: if you’re going to be able to back up both of those assertions—your “science” has to be bulletproof.  If it isn’t—and there’s even an inkling of politicization—casting doubt on the entire alarmist enterprise is worth more than two points.

And after a safety, the scoring team gets to go on offense.