Climate Realism Meets Cancel Culture at Duke University

In a recent article in The Australian, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg outlines what the climate cancel culture will do to a person when they get a platform to talk about the factual side of climate alarmism – climate realism citing real world data.

Dr. Lomborg was recently invited by Duke University to give a lecture about his latest book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

It seems reasonable enough. After all, college campuses are supposed to be centers for diversity of culture and thought, right?

Well, not so much when facts get in the way of a socially driven narrative. A group of climate student activists and professors – some who write for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – publicly demanded his lecture be canceled.

The Durham Sunrise Movement published an open letter in the Duke University Chronicle saying:

“The undersigned call on the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke to end its conflicts of interest by denying platforms to Koch-funded diffusers of misinformation. We call on Duke as a whole to commit to its professed academic standards and deny platforms to climate deniers.”

That “Koch-funded diffusers of misinformation” is a typical denigrating label used by people without a factual argument to demean anyone who questions the severity of climate change. I myself have been a victim of that label, even though the Koch brothers have never given me a dime nor have they ever corresponded with me.

Thankfully, Duke didn’t cave to the activists’ craven arguments. You can watch the whole lecture here on YouTube (or at least until they take it down).

But what is most interesting is that Lomborg isn’t a “climate denier” or even a “skeptic.” He simply says that while climate change is happening, we don’t need to panic, and we can manage much of it through mitigation and adaptation. After all, humanity has survived and thrived during changes in climate over the past 2,000 years, when we were less technologically equipped to do so than we are now.

The screeching academic activists that dominate the climate conversation want dissent eliminated, leaving themselves the only ones authorized to tell you how scared you should be of “climate change.” We shouldn’t let them eliminate dissent, otherwise we’ll be wasting trillions of dollars on ineffective climate policies that won’t really do much.

Yet, climate activists tell us, if we don’t spend everything on climate now, nothing else matters, because they believe climate change threatens our very existence. As President Joe Biden says: climate change is “an existential threat”. That’s why they think they have the moral high ground – because they are “saving humanity” and therefore should use cancel culture to extinguish dissenting voices.

That is a classic case of noble-cause corruption.

According to Wikipedia:

“Noble cause corruption is corruption caused by the adherence to a teleological ethical system, suggesting that people will use unethical or illegal means to attain desirable goals, a result which appears to benefit the greater good.”

Collusion and corruption go hand-in-hand with the climate cancel culture, because they believe their viewpoint is morally superior to anyone else.

Meanwhile, the Earth doesn’t care and the biosphere is happily absorbing the extra carbon dioxide to help plants thrive, greening the Earth throughout this century.

But they won’t tell you such happy news, because a greener Earth is apparently a thing not to be discussed in the rarefied air of academia.

Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Thank you, Anthony.
    It is you and others like you, who instruct with facts, not alarmist feelings, that I will continue to follow on these issues of climate and weather.

  2. “The undersigned call on the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke to end its conflicts of interest by denying platforms to……”

    All of the “Undersigned” should have been immediately escorted from the campus and never allowed to return.

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