Chuckles Bites the Dust

The heir to the British throne, who, as Jethro Tull sang is thick as a brick, is incensed that "skeptics" have hijacked the debate surrounding man-caused global climate change. According to Chuckles, virtuous eco-warriors are being overwhelmed by the skeptics' "psedo-science". Melanie Phillips, who unlike Chuck is one smart cookie, thinks he's full of hot air:

Question: who is more likely to be the scientific pseud – Prince Charles or any of the above? Frankly, more sense is spoken by his plants.

So how can one explain this bizarre inversion of just who is victimising whom in the AGW debate? In my book, I also wrote about the phenomenon of ‘psychological projection’. When people don’t want to admit certain unpleasant things about themselves, they project these unbearable characteristics onto other people instead.

This is such a notable characteristic of the fanatics who promote AGW theory and a host of other ‘closed thought’ ideologies. Proponents of AGW, for example, regularly claim that climate-change sceptics are ‘flat-earthers’ who deny the evidence of science. But it is the warmists themselves whose claims fly in the face of scientific principles and demonstrable evidence, while real science and objectivity are on the sceptics’ side.

What is surely so intolerable for the proponents of global warming and other ideologies is a particular form of knowledge or reasoning that at some level they know to be true but which is lethal to their worldview. Because that worldview is a closed thought system that can admit to no flaw, any reasoning that challenges it must be denied and opposed so as to prevent their whole moral and intellectual identity from being destroyed. This process sets up a pattern of thinking that turns truth and lies inside out.

Perhaps the most mind-twisting example of psychological projection is the claim that the people you victimise are actually victimising you – even while it is you who dominate and receive an uncritical reception on media talk shows, who get grant-funding to subsidise your professional career and whose books are prominently displayed in bookshops, while your opponents are kept off or are given a hard time on the talk-shows, receive precious little grant funding and can hardly get their books published. But as soon as those opponents finally make their voices heard to point out that you are in error, you start screaming that you are being victimised.

The fact is that the proponents of AGW have been rumbled as having perpetrated one of the biggest pseudo-scientific frauds of all time – and they know it. Hence the Royal scream. It's over, Your Royal Highness -- and you were on the wrong side.

And certainly in more ways than one.