Sara Robinson

Writing about fascism for an American audience is always a fraught business. Invariably, a third of the readers will dismiss the topic (and your faithful blogger's basic sanity) out of hand. Either they've got their own definition of fascism and whatever's going on doesn't seem to fit it; or else they're firm believers in a variant of Godwin's Law, which says (with some justification) that anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility. I get letters, most of which say something to the effect of, "Calm down. You're overreacting. We're nowhere near there yet."

Another third will pepper me with missives that are every bit as dismissive -- for exactly the opposite reason. To them, anyone who's been paying the barest amount of attention should realize that America has been a fascist state since (choose one 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) The Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, my careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive -- clear evidence that I'm simply not seeing the full horror of America as it truly is, and always has been, at least since (insert date here).

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Richard S. Lindzen

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action.

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

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