"Have you now, or have you ever been ... ?" (updated)

Guyon Espiner, who's neither a scientist nor apparently a journalist, appears willing however to channel the ghost of one Joseph McCarthy. See the grandstanding fool burning the AGW heretics right here on the Ken and Barbie Show.

UPDATE 1: "Panic Mode": "British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore's latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are 'panicking'."

   Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his "flat earth fantasies" for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.
   "The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't got warmer since 1998," he points out. "And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period ... of global cooling."
   Monckton contends Gore is now "panicking" because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on "telling the world that we're all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies." He also contends that Gore is the largest "global-warming profiteer."
Gore's group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed "climate crisis." But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his "green investment company" because to do so would violate racketeering laws by "peddling a false prospectus."

[Hat tip Leighton Smith]

UPDATE 2: Annie Fox gets a knock on the door from a Greenpeace lass:

   She ... asked if I wanted a "better world for my children." ... "Yes" I said "I do want a better world for my nieces" and that was precisely why I wouldn't support Greenpeace or any other environmentalist organisations.
   It is the very people that Greenpeace attack that make my world, this world, a beautiful place to live in [I told her]. They provide me with light when it's dark, food when I'm hungry, movies when I'm bored, champagne when I'm celebrating, chemo when I'm dying, planes when I'm in the mood to view this beautiful world. They also provide me all the necessities that allow me to do the job I love - books, computers, software, internet, financial markets, the cup that holds my tea and the tea itself.
   The policies and aim of these environmentalists are no less than a desire to turn man back into animals, scrambling around in caves, or at best eking out a meager existence on a farm. This world they desire would mean millions upon millions would stave to death, and they would be the lucky ones. The rest would live a short and miserable existence in a truly malevolent world. A world that would kill me and my nieces and all future generations of my family. I would no sooner align myself with the green movement than I would the Ebola Virus.

I don't expect the lass will be knocking on that door again for a while.

UPDATE 3: Further to the comment above referencing McCarthyism, Murray Rothbard is unusually perceptive on the legacy of the Senator from Wisconsin.  It was, in fact, McCarthy and "McCarthyism" he argues that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from small-government quasi-libertarianism to today's holy-rolling anti-Communism, with all that implied.  This is the very platform from which the Buckley conservatives buried the classical liberal 'Old Right.' Reflected Rothbard in the 1970s: the "problem with anti-Communism as a movement ... is how it diverts domestic policy away from individual liberty toward the police-state paternalism for which 'conservatism' has become synonymous."

At any rate, in retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic red-baiting: "How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs."