Gore, greenhouse gas and Godwin's Law

This is at least the second time I'm aware of that a major "Global Warming" acolyte has dragged Hitler into the discussion...

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis. The former US Vice President said the world lacked the political will to act and invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill by encouraging leaders to unite their nations to fight climate change...

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as the threat from Nazi Germany.

Yeah, those blistering temperatures lately just don't rile people the way the Blitzkrieg did.

The Global Warming craze is another example of a "moral equivalent of war," a deal by which people are convinced to give up more power to the State in the name of solving some problem (most of them created by the State in the first place, or at least exacerbated by it). Once nuclear weapons made it more problematic to take advantage of the maxim "war is the health of the State," would-be national saviors had to find less potentially radioactive causes around which to scare and rally the masses.

Perhaps the planet is warming. Perhaps not. In either case, the extent to which human, versus cyclical natural factors is at play is more difficult to determine than the chicken-littlists would admit. No, they'd rather paint their skeptical cross-examiners as something less than moral:

By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

Germany has a law against denying the Holocaust... a sentiment I can understand but certainly not support. With such a precedent, it would not surprise me to eventually see attempts to ban questioning Anthropogenic Global Warming, Evolution, or even Obama's effectiveness.

Refusing your opponent the chance to rebut shows a lack of confidence, not moral righteousness. As it should be, Godwin's Law has long been recognized on the internet as the moment when an argument jumps the shark. We have a pretty full plate of issues. How about we agree encouraging renewable energy is a good thing for many reasons... but let's not get hysterical about climate change when the 'change' isn't exactly what's being touted.