How not to sway someone toward climate change skepticism.

There's some good stuff in the new issue of First Things: Anthony Esolen and Alan Jacobs turn in solid essays, there's an overture toward dialogue with Muslim theologians, and George Weigel's essay about John Paul II might be interesting to people who haven't yet read Witness to Hope. But William Happer's attack on the global-warming consensus is . . . problematic. There are no fewer than five places where Happer compares his opponents to dictators or fictional authoritarians:

• "This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign."
• "Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya."
• "Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used routinely in media reports and the blogosphere; and we now see attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to the skeptical hero, Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984."
• "We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly."
  
• "Not unlike functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto 'Ignorance is Strength,' many members of the environmental news media dutifully and uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade."

Granting for the sake of argument that Happer is completely right, what we'd have is a case of massive funding skewing research results and leading to bad policy, with some scientists being unable to publish their legitimate research. Nobody is being tortured, murdered, or sent to the gulag. Comparing the climate change movement to Stalinism, as Happer does, is almost actively offensive; it certainly trivializes the moral horrors of the twentieth century.