I’ve been waiting to find out how the guardians of scientific orthodoxy are going to get skeptics of anthropogenic global warming into court.

A bit of background, though: perhaps the most remarkable — and troubling — aspect of the struggle over Darwinism in our public square is the use of courts and civil sanctions by Darwinists to silence dissent. In state after state, Darwinists have dragged teachers and school boards into courts to silence honest scientific discussion of non-evolutionary views in the classroom.

Even a brief statement to students about genuine scientific method and objectivity has been the spark for ruinous litigation aimed at silencing dissent on Darwin’s theory and at the deliberate financial ruin of school districts.

The guardians of scientific correctness in evolutionary biology use force to impose their ideology. The latest scientific orthodoxy deemed immune to challenge is anthropogenic global warming, in many ways the successor to Darwinian orthodoxy. But I have wondered: given the proclivity of many in the scientific community to use legal force to silence discussion, how could warmists prosecute their dissenters in court, lacking as they do even the pretense of Establishment Clause issues with global warming dissent?

Here’s how:

The Climate Change Inquisition Begins

New York’s Attorney general is sending out the message that corporations who fund climate change skeptics will face political reprisal.

New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has started an investigation of Exxon Mobil “to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.” According to The New York Times, its sources “said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science.” See what they did there? To have a different view of climate science is to “undermine” it because there is no scientific study of the climate except that which they agree with.

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This is about suppressing political speech by using the threat of government prosecution to intimidate corporations into withdrawing funding from pro-free-market advocates.

This is part of the whole “consensus” scam that is central to global warming hysteria. The idea is to make it impossible for scientists who are skeptical of global warming to receive any funding or get published in peer-reviewed journals — and then declare that, lo and behold, there are no published scientists who are skeptical about global warming! The idea is to proclaim a spontaneous “consensus” that you created by excluding anyone who disagrees with you.

[T]his is another case where the prosecution is the punishment. Just the prospect of being dragged through the courts and publicly maligned by prosecutors is deterrent enough.

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It seems [the New York attorney general] has learned from the neo-authoritarians in Russia and China how to impose political control. There is no need for anything so crude as outright censorship. Anybody can say what they like, if they’re shouting on a street corner or writing in the pages of some obscure journal for intellectuals. But nobody can get any money to broadcast their views more widely because anyone with money faces ruin if they stand out against the powers that be.

That’s the new regime New York’s attorney general just announced.

The difference between our government’s suppression of scientific dissent and Lysenkoism is becoming more difficult to see. Darwinism and anthropogenic global warming have been declared state orthodoxy, enforced by courts and prosecutors. If you are a teacher or an administrator or a school board or a corporation and you don’t toe the Darwinian and warmist line, you are liable to end up in court.

First they came for the Darwin skeptics. Now they come for the global warming skeptics. The right and responsibility of scientific dissent in America are under assault.

Image credit: Pubdog [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.