Thursday, January 18, 2007

Land of the Free

This is why people say that it requires constant vigilance to maintain our freedom. The totalitarian impulse is strong and apparently even afflicts meteorologists:

The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

The Weather Channel's (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.

Read the rest of the article at the link. One would think that people who practice meteorology, of all disciplines, would have been chastened often enough by errant forecasts that they'd be a little less dogmatic and a little more humble than Heidi Cullen appears to be.

Next thing we'll be reading that those who doubt Darwinism should lose their Ph.D.s. (although I think that's already been suggested) and anyone who voted for Bush should have their citizenship suspended (which a lot of people probably already think but haven't yet made bold enough to say).

Anyway, will somebody please mail Ms Cullen a copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty? It's the best antidote for what ails her that I can think of.

RLC