An acclaimed environmental studies professor contends that those who do not believe that humans are causing global warming are mentally ill and need to be "treated," according to a recent story at American Thinker.

Keri Norgaard teaches at the University of Oregon and is the author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life.  In her book she compares global warming skepticism to racism, arguing that there is a "cultural resistance" that keeps some people from acknowledging that humans are responsible for global warming.  This condition, she claims, "... must be recognized and treated" as an aberrant sociological behavior.

Norgaard also claims, "Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order.  From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected."  She continues, saying, "This kind of cultural resistance to a very significant social threat is something that we would expect in any society facing a massive threat."

Norgaard even goes so far as to say that such cultural resistance to accepting the theory of anthropogenic global warming is comparable to what happened when slavery was challenged in the Southern United States.

Norgaard has been making such radical pronouncements for years.  In a 2009 interview with Wired magazine, she said, "Global warming ... threatens the survival of our species[.]"

Translated, she's saying that if we don't do something, we're all gonna die. 

But Norgaard is not a lone voice of reckless eco-rhetoric.  In fact, green scare-mongering is a common practice amongst those in the environmental movement -- and such comments have the potential to incite societal panic.

After the shooting of Arizona Congressional Representative Gabrielle Giffords, there was a call to tone down the violent political rhetoric, which Democratic congressional members claimed was originating from the right.

Democratic National Committee Chairperson and Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz took to the cameras of CNN, stating, "Words matter."  She then reminded her fellow public servants that "[i]n terms of civility and tone we have to set an example."

It's too bad the congresswoman won't have the same conversation with her friends in the environmental community.  Let's start at the top with an outlandish quote from Al Gore:

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid.  This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

If such an asteroid really did slam into the earth, it's thought that the impact would have been thousands of times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb.  The Nobel laureate is threatening the public with a catastrophe that defies the imagination.  Gore is engaging in dangerous speech that could cause an unbalanced mind to go wobbly and do something awful. 

Let's go next to Al's friend, NASA director James Hansen. 

"The climate is nearing tipping points," he said in a 2009 opinion piece published in one of London's most popular newspapers. "Changes are beginning to appear and there is a potential for explosive changes, effects that would be irreversible, if we do not rapidly slow fossil-fuel emissions over the next few decades."    

Hansen next describes the apocalyptic warning signs. 

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

Hansen then reveals the primary demon behind such environmental evil -- coal.

Coal is not only the largest fossil fuel reservoir of carbon dioxide, it is the dirtiest fuel. Coal is polluting the world's oceans and streams with mercury, arsenic and other dangerous chemicals[.] ... The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains.  Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

Folks, this is a director of NASA speaking.  An irrational mind might just take this maniacal rhetoric to heart, and strap him- or herself to the train tracks in an attempt to halt such a "death train."

NASA isn't the only federal agency associated with climate scare-mongering; the Environmental Protection Agency is also in on the game.  Posted on the EPA's website is a list of frequently asked questions on global warming.  In one response, the agency declares, "Climate change health effects are especially serious for the very young, very old, or for those with heart and respiratory problems."

Another EPA document states, "... climate change will likely increase the number of people suffering from illness and injury due to floods, storms, droughts, and fires, as well as allergies and infectious diseases"[1].

Quite frankly, we should be grateful that more people don't react to such wild comments the way a few have. 

In 2010, James Jay Lee executed a dangerous hostage plot inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel.  Armed with what appeared to be pipe bombs and a cheap pistol, Lee claimed to have been "awakened" by Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.  Lee regarded humans as the "most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around."  His desire was to force the Discovery Channel to fill its programming schedule with "solutions to save the planet."  Before he was able to harm innocent life, Lee was shot and killed by police.

Lee is not the first eco-freak to go off the deep end.  In 2005, four years after 9/11, the FBI declared eco-terrorism to be America's number-one domestic threat.

Of course the most notorious eco-terrorist is Ted Kaczynski -- the Unabomber.  Over a seventeen-year period during the eighties and nineties, Kaczynski sent out mail bombs, killing three people and wounding twenty-two.  He also managed to sneak a bomb onto a 747 passenger jet flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C.  Fortunately, the bomb didn't go off as planned.  Kaczynski's reign ended in 1996, shortly after he made public his now-infamous manifesto written in his tiny cabin located in the backwoods of western Montana.  In it he opined, "One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance.  Hence, the population explosion, with all that it implies[.] ... No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be foreseen."

And discovered by the FBI in the Unabomber's hovel?  A well-worn copy of Al Gore's, Earth In The Balance.  Kaczynski apparently was quite taken by Gore's missive.  The Unabomber's copy of Earth in the Balance was dog-eared, underlined, marked, and well-worn. 

The infectious perspective of the environmental movement has slithered into every aspect of American life, including our schools, churches and synagogues, and public policy.  An entire generation and more have now been raised in a perpetual pall that declares that the earth is doomed because of mankind's pollution.  These same citizens have been duped into believing that America's experiment with capitalism and free markets has been a complete failure, with the major evidence for this charge being climate change.  Having been fed a continual diet of junk science and raised with strict environmental regulations, they believe such stratagems to be the norm, and, consequently, they simply accept the dogma without question.

This is why we must be armed with the truth to confront the eco-lies that surround us, and make sure we elect people of good character into office: to repeal a host of legislation designed to replace American liberty with eco-tyranny.

Brian Sussman is the author of Eco-Tyranny: How the Left's Green Agenda Will Dismantle America.  He also hosts the morning-drive radio show on KSFO in San Francisco.

[1] "Climate Change and Health Effects," United States Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/downloads/Climate_Change_Health.pdf.