by Fred Pearce<

That's actually all you need to read to know that the article is going to be crap. See Deltoid on Pearce's DDT denialism for more fun.

There’s a crucial difference between publicly denying the Holocaust and denying climate change.

One, denying the Holocaust, is intended to stand as an early guard against the danger of reenacting a past sin. to function as a form of national atonement and mostly as a freely chosen expression by modern Germans of the repugnance they feel at what their ancestors did.

Perhaps you can think of other nations who could use a dollop of that kind of humility also, given their collective history.

Denying climate change is not comparable to denying the Holocaust- the model is all wrong.

Denying climate change is more like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, or in this case, “no fire” in a burning theater- you’re misrepresenting an fast-approaching, life-threatening reality, and because you are doing this, people die.

Is it illegal? When considered in the abstract, then a good case can be made that what deniers are doing is illegal right now, if it can be shown that they know they’re lying or there’s a reasonable expectation that they know they’re misrepresenting reality. Deciding that someone is lying is the everyday, humdrum business of courts everywhere.

But there’s historical context to support Richard Chapman’s assertion that lying about climate change should be and even already is a crime.

After WWII, the Allies wanted to prosecute the Nazis under the rule of law, but they had a big problem. The Germans had not broken any law by killing the Jews in Germany. They had only applied their horrifying own laws to their own citizens. They were a sovereign state and entitled to pass and prosecute what laws they saw fit.

The solution for the Allies was to create a new category of crime, post-hoc, and charge the Nazis with committing that crime. That new law was called “Crimes Against Humanity” and the legal sleight of hand used by the Allies was the assertion that this crime and the lawful injunction against committing it, implicitly existed at all times and at all places.

In reality, at the time, Crimes Against Humanity was just an academic concept largely being kicked around by intellectuals in the European cafes and universities .

The lesson here is clear. The law will not permit crimes of enormous magnitude to go unpunished. Perps who think are immune from prosecution because what they did was not illegal in some very narrow technical sense are advised to confine their criminal activity to limited-effect, noxious things like tax evasion. Thinking they can engage in behavior which consigns millions to die and force society to let them get away with it only indicates that they don’t understand the deep raison d’etre and workings of criminal justice.

In the case of wanton, depraved actions which lead to the mass death of innocents, criminals should know this- the law will go where ever they lead and, with great certainty, the law will not permit itself to be subverted in either spirit or utility by criminals who think they have found a legal black hole through which they can smuggle the death of innocent millions .

The engineers of denialism, the primary sources who are self-consciously working to subvert what they know is the truth have a lot to worry about. The ultimate safe house for their activity- their claims that they sincerely believed what they were saying- will be soon be demolished. Proving that someone was lying or believed they were likely misrepresenting the truth is a near-future technology we will acquire presently. Lying, even to yourself, is not a no-cost event in your brain, and one day soon we will be able to detect that activity with near 100% certainty.

Even before that technology is achieved, we have the means to prosecute them. The defense that they “really believed it” is every bit as penetrable as the defense of “just following orders” was. It ‘s efficacy decreases with the magnitude of the crime and the body count.

Sea level rise varies a lot, a multi-dozenn foot rise in sea level (including depression associated with it) is well within the range of current warming and is very likely to occur if we pass a threshold with glacial ice. That would not be RGE but it would be a disaster. (Denialists will say it would not be a disaster because we need to rethink cities anyway.) That could happen under CURRENT atmospheric C conditions. It may in fact already be happening. It is probably a step-wise process.

If blocking air masses start to become normal, we can expect deep freezes north of some wavy moving line and heat waves below it, and hurricanes plowing into the US and Canada’s east coast all the time (most atlantic hurricanes follow a course that would do what Sandy did if the blocking masses were there all the time). We can probably adjust to hurricanes constantly hitting the Northeast, but for the sea level rise, which means, essentially, moving those damn out of date citeis.

RGE is highly unlikely. Long before it happened fully (i.e., no liquid water on the planet) we would all be cooked. Not metaphorically. Cooked because the RGE is literally when the atmosphere is hot enough that water always boils or evaporates and hardly ever occurs in liquid form. But long before that happens we have a goodly number of disasters to encounter first.

The thing is, the conditions for some of these are not in the future. They are now. it just takes a while to unfold.

I’m hoping for option (a), myself. But I fear option (b) is more likely, and in such a world outlawing climate change denialism will be unnecessary.

If the Earth was in serious peril, then openly denying that peril would be putting the World at a greater risk. I’m not talking about the current situation and the current crop of climate change deniers. I’m talking about the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect. If our best scientists came to the conclusion that we were coming up on a tipping point of a runaway greenhouse effect and we had 50 – 100 years to turn it around, then I believe that would be the time to effectively shut down all apposing voices.

One thing that bothers me; I have yet to hear anyone rule out a runaway greenhouse effect. Most likely that’s due to the fact that it’s so unlikely. Let’s hope that’s the reason anyway.

I find your suggestion to make climate change denial a criminal offsense so outrageous that I suspect you are just trolling. Denial of the harm of smoking, or denial of evolution, were never ciminalised, or even suggestion made of such a thing. To have done so would have handed the deniers a gratuitous victory.

The stakes are high. Our Planet is also our prison. We cannot escape. If it becomes a hell hole, we die. The day when it becomes illegal to be an idiot (not my first word choice) about the climate changes cannot come too soon for me.