The climate jackboots will not brook even the slightest deviation from their line

Per Noah Rothman at Commentary, look at what has been heaped upon an American Enterprise Institute scholar for daring to point out some undeniable facts:

American Enterprise Institute scholar Danielle Pletka attracted an unusual amount of attention for her remarks on the subject. In a brief soliloquy, she said that she doesn’t believe “we can have any doubt” about the existence of climate change, though we can join the scientific community in speculating about the precise degree to which human activity contributes to that change.

Pletka went on to note mitigating phenomena that, in her view, don’t receive due attention. The last two years were typified by the “biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s,” she said. Pletka added that carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. are declining even after America pulled out of the Paris accords, and American industry has shifted away from burning so-called “dirty coal,” unlike its European counterparts.

The AEI scholar’s critics noted that extreme temperature fluctuation doesn’t tell us much about the climate, which is fair. But “dirty coal” burning in America isdeclining at a terminal rate despite the loosening regulatory climate, and the United States has led the world in CO2 emissions reductions even without a non-binding international treaty compelling it to do so. Pletka observed in closing that this was the work of industry, consumer preference, and capitalist innovation, and not oppressive central planning (which is entirely correct).

“We shouldn’t be hysterical” about the problem of climate change, Pletka concluded. You’d think she shot someone’s dog on live television.

On Twitter, investigative reporter Alex Kotch insisted that this “non-scientist” perspective was advanced in service to “the biggest fossil fuel polluters in the world, Koch Industries.” Attorney Max Kennerly contended that it was “inexcusable” to allow Pletka to opine at all on this subject. “This is PR for polluters, not journalism,” he barked. “This is crazy,” ABC News analyst Matt Dowd said. “Balance shouldn’t be the goal, truth should.” “People tune in to be informed not be subjected to propaganda,” former Think Progress founder Judd Legum tweeted. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, and controversialclimatologist Michael Mann all attacked the network for giving Pletka a platform to discuss climate as it relates to public policy.

There was no such outrage over the response from Pletka’s counterpart, New York Times columnist and fellow “non-scientist” Helene Cooper, which tells you all you need to know about this ginned-up controversy. “I actually think we should be hysterical,” she said. “I think anybody who has children or anybody who can imagine having children and grandchildren, how can you look at them and think this is the kind of world that through our own inaction and our inability to do something, that we’re going to leave them?”

Charges of totalitarian motives and aims get bandied about in post-America with such regularity that  they they've become instantly banal as soon as they're lobbed, but this is indeed the real deal.

But look at what they demand we ignore:

For Pletka’s detractors, the likely source of consternation wasn’t her professional expertise but her refusal to accept a straight-line projection at face value. That is, however, the only prudent course considering how many climate-related prognostications have not panned out. In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s First Assessment Report’s predictions related to rates of warming and temperature changes were erroneous. The IPCC’s 2001 assessment that climate change would reduce the severity of snow storms did not materialize. The Arctic should be ice-free by now if climate scientists’ predictions were always accurate. As Abe Greenwald noted just last week, the scientific consensus around the rate of oceanic warming was successfully challenged not by the deliberate process of peer review but by a freelancing skeptic with time enough to critically parse the data. Given the failure of these near-term predictions to manifest, it’s only reasonable not to lend too much credence to a projection that takes us nearly 100 years into the future.

The Left demands you ignore these facts, just like it demands that you get on board with the idea of more than two genders.

These people mean business.