It must be nice to be so certain of one’s moral purity and political correctness to believe that anything, including, well, lying, is fine and appropriate to advance the cause.
Consider physicist Richard A. Muller’s recent interview with Grist:
What’s your take on NASA climate scientist James Hansen?
Hansen I’ve known for many years. He’s a very good climate scientist, but he’s decided to do the politics. I feel that he’s doing some cherry-picking of his own [when it comes to the science]. At that point, he’s not really being a scientist. At that point, you’re being a lawyer. He’s being an effective advocate for his side, but in the process of doing that he’s no longer a neutral party and he’s no longer giving both sides of the issues.…
I know you drive a Prius. What else are you doing to reduce your carbon emissions? My house is lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs. Let me just tell you, though: Suppose I drove an SUV and lit my house with the worst kind of light — I could still be an environmentalist. Al Gore flies around in a jet plane — absolutely fine with me. The important thing is not getting Al Gore out of his jet plane; the important thing is solving the world’s problem. What we really need are policies around the world that address the problem, not feel-good measures. If [Al Gore] reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion — which he does, but he’s very effective at it — then let him fly any plane he wants.At least Muller admits that James Hansen no longer is a real scientist, but rather is doing politics. That doesn’t seem to bother Muller. And his assessment of Gore–well, what’s a little “exaggeration and distortion” among friends? If the facts about catastrophic warming are so compelling, then why aren’t the facts enough? Presumably because, well, the facts aren’t nearly as compelling as the alarmist lobby wishes to believe.
If one is pushing a good cause, and who in Washington doesn’t believe they are doing so?, then who is not entitled to exaggerate, distort, and even lie?
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When your case is being made by distortion, then you have gone too far. Without distortion, there is no global warming. We are then overloading the financial system with worthless spending to counter a
phony disaster. This overload will prevent us from dealing effectivly with the real problems of disease and starvation and social unrest. It doesn't get much worse than this little distortion.
Very illuminating and ethical. Everything is relative in this world, evidently even one's ethic and moral is relative after all. I would be ashamed if my children or my wife would happen to know that this is my moral.
Al Gore himself endorsed lying about global warming in a May 2006 interview (<cite>”Al Revere”</cite>) in the same magazine: “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous [global warming] is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are…”