Clive Hamilton has a post at HuffPo that takes a devastating look at the criminal, and in some cases terrorist, tactics the climate change deniers are employing. Go read it all, but here’s a sample (emphasis added):

Climate denial has outgrown the early lobbyist strategies of oil corporations and conservative think tanks. Since 1997, Republican rhetoric characteristically linked global warming to left-wing beliefs. But recently, tactics to discredit the opponents of climate change have expanded into efforts to intimidate them into silence as climate denial pitches itself to a right-wing, populist audience.

One symptom of this shift is the ongoing campaign of cyber-bullying directed at climate scientists themselves. Any climate scientist in the news now receives a torrent of aggressive and abusive emails. As Stanford’s prominent climatologist Stephen Schneider says: “It’s ugly death threat stuff; ‘You belong in jail,’ ‘You should be executed.’ [This] never happened… a year ago. [But] now it’s off the charts.”

The climate change deniers efforts to intimidate is not confined to verbal threats. Schneider reports that climatologist Ben Santer found a shredded animal on his doorstep late one night after someone rang his doorbell.

Targeting individuals at their residences is a strong indication that the intimidation campaign is determined and well-orchestrated. Internet sites like Climate Depot focus the efforts of an emerging army of aggressive bloggers. This reflects climate denial’s jump from the world of think tanks into wider populist politics where the “global warming conspiracy” segues into a cauldron of right-wing grievances. Climate Depot is managed by a conservative activist — Mark Marano — famous for demanding that climate scientists be “publicly flogged.” The site supplies a steady stream of anti-warming tirades from other conservative icons including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter.

…

It seems very clear now that populist anger is encouraged by a network of conservative think tanks funded, in part, by Big Carbon. These links, which have been heavily documented, are close enough to provoke the Royal Society to take the unprecedented step of writing to Exxon Mobil asking the company to desist from funding anti-science groups.

The various arms of these climate change denial efforts are united by their loathing of environmentalism. Environmentalism is variously seen to be the enemy of individual freedom, an ideology of smug elites, an attack on the consumerist basis of capitalism, or the vanguard of world government.

For deniers, accepting climate science would mean admitting that unrestrained capitalism has jeopardized humanity’s future. But this painful admission would mean more than that environmentalists were right all along, it would initiate a demand for comprehensive and urgent government intervention. This would be intolerable. It’s easier to reject climate science and conduct business as usual even though it means humanity’s future is “harsh, brutish and short.”

Again, please go read it all, if you have the stomach for it.

I think it’s absurd for me or anyone else on my “side” of this battle to have to say this, but I feel obligated to give it one more shot:

  • I am an environmentalist, for exactly one reason: It’s in humanity’s best interest for all of us to be environmentalists, to remember that we’re living on Spaceship Earth, not Infinite Earth.
  • I don’t hate personal freedom. In fact, I’m more than a little bit fond of it. But I’ve also seen and done enough in my time to know that completely unbridled freedom isn’t utopia, it’s anarchy. No one with more than three gray cells to rub together argues that laws against murder, rape, kidnapping (and many other hideous things we do to each other), plus our constant efforts to catch, try, and punish people who commit those crimes are a good thing. So why, I ask, shouldn’t we take the same approach to those who continue to diminish humanity’s future for the sake of short-term profits by emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases at a wildly unsustainable rate?
  • I don’t hate capitalism. But I do think that we need to see the big picture. We can use capitalism (and the freedom of personal choice) as a powerful tool to do what’s in our own best long term interest. A perfect example is a feebate on cars to give people a very strong incentive to buy much more fuel efficient models. Under such a scheme no one would dictate what any individual buys, but we’d still get the desired aggregate result by tilting the competitive landscape.
  • And lest anyone think for a nanosecond that I’ve overlooked the terrorists committing the acts mentioned above, let me make my view crystal clear: The people doing this are either the corporate thugs doing it purely for money, or they’re the loser sycophants who attach themselves to those corporate thugs and wrap themselves in some pathetic, warped vision of being patriots saving their country from evil environmentalists.

    To the corporate thugs and sycophants: Fight all you want; you’re on the wrong side of history in this battle and you know it. You will lose this fight, just as you lost on cigarette smoking, asbestos, CFCs, and the use of many other industrial processes and chemicals. The world would be a better place for all of you to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for your actions (not your beliefs, no matter how twisted).

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