The crumbling warmist paradigm

I don't agree with Thomas Kuhn's account of why scientific ideas change, but his description of how people behave as their comfortable 'scientific paradigm' crumbles seems to be borne out in the increasingly hyperbolic statements of prominent warmists.

"Paradigm shifts," Kuhn explained, overturn the established order. Emotions run high. The process begins with "scientists … behav[ing] differently" and continues with "pronounced professional insecurity" whereby years and perhaps lifetimes of work and writing are put at risk.  [Quoted in Capitalism at Work]

Witness for example media mogul Ted Turner, whose Time Warner empire peddles climate porn by the truckload, and who told PBS's Charlie Rose on Tuesday that "not taking drastic action to correct global warming ... will be catastrophic." Catastrophic!

We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

None of the crops will grow!  We'll all be cannibals!  No sign of hysteria, insecurity or "different" behaviour there.  (Meanwhile, outside Turner's window, global warming comes to Michigan.) 

Now Turner isn't a scientist, far from it, but NASA's James Hansen is.  Hansen is a leading warmist -- it was Hansen who first popularised the warmist mythology back in 1998 on the basis of little more than one hot summer -- and now after a decade of declining temperatures when according to all the models we should be seeing an accelerating increase, he's seeing his "paradigm" crumble and he's starting to lash out. He recently likened the proposed construction of a new coal-based power plant as equivalent to the holocaust. He said the trains that bring coal to the new power plant are nothing else than the "death trains" that were moving the Jews to extermination camps.  And now he accuses Duke Energy's James Rogers of being a prospective killer for supporting a new coal plant.

"The process begins with 'scientists … behav[ing] differently' and continues with 'pronounced professional insecurity' whereby years and perhaps lifetimes of work and writing are put at risk. "  Keep watching.