Renowned for innovation, Moses Znaimer has never been afraid of hearing out ideas that run against the stream. So in character, one of the presenters Znaimer chose for his IdeaCity gathering currently happening on the cusp of Toronto's Annex neighborhood was the cantankerous and convincing Christopher Monckton. The United Kingdom Independence Party's chief spokesman on Climate Change, Monckton is one of the most prominent challengers of the prevailing Global Warming hysteria that embodies the current zeitgeist.
As many who have actually studied the issue know, the data on global warming provides, at the very least, ample ground for skepticism that current weather trends spell the end of life on earth as we know it. But with the media, the majority of the political class, and pop-figures like David Suzuki pushing junk science to the masses, a Global Warming cult has emerged that exhibits all the fanatical devotion that you would have found littered among the corpses at Jonestown. For them, anthropogenic Global Warming is a fact which can tolerate no challenge. It is, in the words of no less a personage than Barack Hussein Obama, "settled science," a term which, as Charles Krauthammer, who is a physician and psychiatrist noted, flouts the basic principles of genuine science. Tellingly, the Global Warming cult's response to Krauthammer's stating that was an attempt to launch an inquisition against him and have him censored.
Using cruel, eloquent sarcasm and biting wit, Monckton mocked the Global Warming cult at sheep who are caught up is a mass of groupthink. He backed it up with fact, such as that despite predictions and models from the International Panel on Climate Change that proved to be wrong, there has been no global warming for the last eighteen years. Monckton cited evidence that suggests that the environmental and economic methods being employed to fight global warming are actually causing more deaths than global warming ever will.
The reality of the science on Global Warming is that there are differing theories of the extent and what will be the outcome of mankind's effect on the environment. Not that most people know that, since huge swaths of the political class, mainstream media and even, as Monckton pointed out, scientific journals have colluded to bully and censor any dissenting opinions into silence.
The normally polite crowd at Znaimer's IdeaCity reflected that. While the responses to presenters can be noted by varied degrees of enthusiasm, something happened during Monckton's presentation that I've never observed at one of the Idea City presentations before. At various times, Monckton was actually hissed at by much of the downtown Toronto "
progressive" crowd at IdeaCity, who felt threatened as their dogmatic beliefs were being challenged and ridiculed.
But there was another sceptic listening to Monckton who gave a strong indication that people are beginning to see through the hysteria of the Global Warming cult and its high priests like Al Gore and Suzuki who profit handsomely from the sale of their liturgic snake oil. Following Monckton's presentation, IdeaCity's host Moses Znaimer said that he sensed that the tide was turning about the belief in Global Warming and realizing that there are compelling facts to indicate, as has happened throughout the history of science, that what is now the majority belief may indeed be wrong.