Climate Change Meets Godwin's Law

Generally, Godwin's Law asserts that as rhetoric expands around a subject, the probability that one side will compare the other side to Nazis or to Hitler approaches 1. It is also a clear sign that whoever used the Hitler analogy is an automatic loser.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, has published an opinion piece for the Gray Lady, entitled The Next Genocide.

"The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science," Snyder writes. I would disagree with the distinguished scholar on this thesis, starting with his conflation of Germans with Nazis. Nazi domination was fueled by the belief that they were the master race, the ubermensch, and that it was their destiny and entitlement to rule the world.

There were other reasons Nazi Germany waged their war of conquest. To avenge the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. And yes, Nazi Germany wanted resources, including energy and Lebensraum.

But Snyder distills the essence of Hitler's desire for living space into a denial "that all the scientific methods of land management - irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers - "could feed the German people from German soil. This is based on Hitler's "Second Book," published in 1928.

Published five years before the American Dustbowl. Perhaps this "denial" of science is actually an unawareness of technology that hasn't been invented yet. I could just as well make an argument that Hitler wanted to conquer the world because he was a vegetarian, and all vegetarians are fascists determined to make all people vegetarians, by killing most of them, if necessary.

"Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic," Snyder writes. The "United States has done more than any other nation to bring about the next ecological panic, yet it is the only country where climate science is still resisted by certain political and business elites."

How interesting that the word "denier" originated with those who questioned the veracity of accounts of the Nazi holocaust. Now it is tossed around to describe people who are mistrustful of the motives of climate scientists. Alarmists like Snyder avoid the use of the word "skeptic," because it conjures the flawed methodology of the climate scientists: the cherry-picking, the falsifications, and the fact that their models are bullshit.

Yes, the planet is warming. We are coming out of an ice age. New York used to lay under a mile-thick sheet of ice. Humans didn't melt that. Besides, increasing CO2 levels are beneficial to plant life.

Snyder concludes his essay by asking the rhetorical question, "Will we accept empirical evidence and support new energy technologies?" I did a word search of Snyder's polemic, and didn't find any references to fracking or nuclear energy. By "new energy technologies," then, Snyder must be referring to windmills.

By ignoring natural gas and nuclear energy, climate alarmists like Snyder give us the choice between windfarms, and technology that hasn't been invented yet.