This sort of thing parodies itself, for obvious reasons. The toxicity of Adam Weinstein's rant against people who disagree with him on climate change lies in his total disregard for the First Amendment and his belief that a court in Italy that found some scientists guilty for misleading the public about the severity of an earthquake sets a "precedent" for American justice.

Whew! What a stinker:

Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It's going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people's deaths. It's time to punish the climate-change liars.

This is an argument that's just being discussed seriously in some circles. It was laid out earlier this month, with all the appropriate caveats, by Lawrence Torcello, a philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

There is a clear precedent, Torcello says, in L'Aquila, Italy, where six seismologists were convicted of manslaughter in connection with a 2009 earthquake that killed 309 people. The scientists weren't convicted because they failed to predict an earthquake; no one can make such a prediction with reliable precision. But they were convened to study a series of tremors the week before the quake, and tacitly signed off on a government official's public message that "the situation looks favorable" and residents should chill out with some wine.

Their "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information," the court found, contributed to the residents' fatal lack of preparations for bigger tremors.

Note: After assuring us that it is impossible to predict an earthquake, he points to an Italian court case where a judge convicted some scientists for...not predicting an earthquake. This is his "clear precedent" for arresting people he considers climate change "deniers."

Who exactly would be prosecuted?

Let's make a clear distinction here: I'm not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth's atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150's gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

Nor am I talking about simple skeptics, particularly the scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy. That is part and parcel of the important public policy discussion about what we do next.

But there is scientific skepticism... and there is a malicious, profiteering quietist agenda posturing as skepticism. There is uncertainty about whether man-made climate change can be stopped or reversed... and there is the body of purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters who exploit the smallest uncertainty at the edges of a settled science.

I'm talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I'm talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I'm talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.

Ooooh..."punished AND stopped." Arrested and whipped? Probably not, but with someone who thinks Italian jurisprudence carries any weight in American courts, you never know.

Go ahead and read the whole thing if you wish. It's fairly obvious Mr. Weinstein has little knowledge of what skeptics truly believe. Perhaps he might want to write a follow up article on climate change advocates who live in terror of losing their jobs and government grants if they publish anything that goes against the dominant scientific "consensus." There is no room for skepticism among global warming advocates today, which is why many of us think climate change advocacy more resembles a religious faith than it does science.