An Apt Description

I’ve just started reading Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. I’m still in the middle of another book, so I don’t know when I’m going to read past Chapter 1, but I found something in the first chapter that seems to be an apt description of the strategy employed by the Left in hyping the AGW myth:

Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

Given that Thomas Sowell’s book was published in 1995, it’s amazing that Al Gore—and Barack Obama—can still get away with playing this game with regard to anthropogenic global warming; it’s amazing, in fact, that they can get away with playing this game at all.