Climate change is a huge problem on multiple dimensions. It is also a problem shrouded in uncertainty. What causes global warming? What proportion is anthropogenic? With what speed, and to what degree will the effects be felt? Will the worldwide benefits to agriculture be greater or less than the losses? Can anything be done to significantly advert further change in the next 50 years?

These are not trivial issues, and many smart people are working on them. Conclusive answers, though, are many years, perhaps decades, in the future. These uncertainties do not excuse inaction, but they do imply the value of caution.

I am, however, confident of one serious problem: climate change is an immediate and large threat to civility, sound science, and rational discourse. The global warming movement has begun to resemble a religious crusade. As such, its supporters are alert to dissent. They brand deviants from the GW political consensus as wicked and stupid. Those who don’t parrot the party line are labeled heretics, apostates, and apologists for special interests.

These ad hominem condemnations are antithetical to the enlightenment values of free and open inquiry, characteristics that foster America’s success. Sound public policy is based on science and reason, not consensus, political pressures, or religion—even if the god is Gaia.

The GW movement is such a powerful force because it harnesses three groups: well-intentioned but naïve folks, those with a stake in the GW industry, and opportunists who use GW to justify imposing their visions of the proper lifestyle on others. All are threatened when responsible, honest people dissent.

Over the decades, I’ve seen earlier versions of this sorry movie. It plays when those who want to direct public policy confront challenges to their preferred script and, hence, connive to intimidate and stifle dissenters.

Politically powerful individuals resent exposure as feeders at the public trough. Twenty-five years ago I directed a Montana State institute whose associates analyzed politically popular programs and found them ecologically destructive and economically wasteful. Montana’s governor was outraged by the implications of our work. He complained to the university president, a person whose ambition trumped his principles and sophistication. The president reported that I, a Unitarian and former board member of the ACLU, was “Nothing but a mouthpiece for the Moral Majority.” He also denied and later repressed a national peer review (posted on FREE’s website) by distinguished economists that confirmed the quality of the center’s work.

I left MSU to run an energy institute at a university in Texas. I arrived just in time for the oil crash of 1986, during which oil went from nearly $30 per barrel ($80 in today’s money) to $13—and then dropped to $9. The governor of Texas, formerly chairman of the board at my university, advocated an oil import tax to protect domestic producers. I objected, most publicly in The Wall Street Journal with a featured column, “A Welfare Plan for U.S. Oil,”—and was subsequently fired. No causal relation of course. I was assured that the letters from oil company officials objecting to my work had no influence on the decision to remove me. Speaking truth to power is a good survival strategy—but only when one values integrity more highly than security.

I served two terms as an academic member of the National Petroleum Council, an advisory council for the federal government. Hence, I knew the chairmen of major and independent oil companies, including Exxon. Several supported FREE’s work and a few, now long retired, still do. They believe that, over the long term, honest analysis is beneficial while stifling dissent is ultimately injurious to their firms and the nation.

Exxon has granted $100 million dollars to Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project. What will people say if the scientists involved in the project release a report documenting the well-known environmental problems associated with increased ethanol use? Surely these scientists will be labeled as heretics. That’s the way crusades work.

Advocates of the GW movement may try to silence dissenting opinions and personally attack those who hold them, but remember, truth is stubborn indeed. Ultimately those whose transitory objections are based on ideology, not reason and science, are exposed.