Ellen Goodman Compares Denial of Global Warming to Denial of the Holocaust

Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman (photo left) wrote in her February 9, 2007 column , "Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

The Anti-Defamation League, so quick to go after Dennis Prager when he criticized Congressman Keith Ellison for taking his oath of office on the Koran, has been silent in response to Ms. Goodman's colossal overstatement. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also has not been heard from. All of which proves once again that being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry.

[The alert and culturally savvy reader will note the hidden allusion in my paraphrase of the famous line from Erich Segal's 1970 novel, "Love Story." Mr. Segal has noted that one model for the protagonist of Love Story was none other than Mr. Global Warming himself, Oscar nominee and former Vice President Al Gore. The other model named by Mr. Segal was Tommy Lee Jones, later the star of the movie "Men In Black," a comedy about space aliens among us, thereby also tying in the theme of the mental state of the swamp-gas left.]

Mark Steyn (photo right) is particularly amused to be lumped together with holocaust deniers, as he writes in this Chigago Sun Times column. Mark used Ms. Goodman's column as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the hostile reaction to his earlier Chicago Sun Times column, which challenged the pronouncements of pundits regarding the recent UN IPPC report on global warming. Mark dared to note, "Alas, the science isn't all that solid." Seeing as how Andrew Sullivan recently accused Mark of being only luke-warm or worse on the subject of genocide, the connection between global warming denial and Holocaust denial seems clear cut indeed.

In the most recent column, Mark writes, with all the callousness one would expect of someone certified by Ellen Goodman and Andrew Sullivan as a global warming/Holocaust denier and a genocide advocate, "So, faced with a degree rise in temperature, we could destroy the planet's economy, technology, communications and prosperity. And ruin the lives of millions of people. Or we could do what man does best: adapt. You do the math." Oh, what evil lurks in the hearts of man!

I particularly appreciated the citation by Mark in his earlier column of the "inconvenient truth" presented by the history of Greenland. The first Europeans to try to colonize North American were Vikings, led by Leif Erickson, in 1001 C.E. Those Vikings sailed from Greenland, from the colonies founded there by Leif's father, Erik the Red, around 982 C.E. The Viking settlers of Greenland sustained themselves and indeed thrived for centuries through fishing, hunting and farming! Farming was possible because, in the words of the Wikipedia article on the history of Greenland (which presumably was not written with the whitewashing of Mark Steyn's shameless global warming denial in mind), "The fjords of the southern part of the island were lush and had a warmer climate at that time, possibly due to what was called the Medieval Warm Period." Those colonies continued to thrive for almost 500 years, and then suddenly disappeared in the fifteenth century with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the onset of the Little Ice Age. The bottom line is that Greenland today, even with the recent decades of warming, is far colder and less temperate than it was from at least 980 until 1450. One could not farm there today, or even in the foreseeable future with projected warming, in the manner that its Norse population did during the Middle Ages. Moreover, since Greenland today is a population center of the polar bear, somehow the polar bear managed to survive extinction during that long warm spell. Go figure. In any event, do not look for Mr. Gore to discuss the history of Greenland in his Oscar acceptance speech.

Finally, the reader might valuably peruse this column by Dennis Prager at RealClearPolitics, in which Dennis observes that the Ellen Goodman comparison is one more example of the difference in how the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right view their political opponents: "With a few exceptions, those on the Left tend to view their ideological adversaries as bad people, i.e., people with bad intentions, while those on the Right tend to view their adversaries as wrong, perhaps even dangerous, but not usually as bad."