You got to hand it some some global warming advocates. When it comes to getting revenge on anyone who would dare question their precious suppositions on climate change, they’ve demonstrated the uncanny ability to channel the ghost of Torquemada while recreating the horror of the Salem Witch Trials:

A U.S. based environmental magazine that both former Vice President Al Gore and PBS newsman Bill Moyers, for his October 11th global warming edition of “Moyers on America” titled “Is God Green?” have deemed respectable enough to grant one-on-one interviews to promote their projects, is now advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of human caused catastrophic global warming.

Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

Gore and Moyers have not yet commented on Grist’s advocacy of prosecuting skeptics of global warming with a Nuremberg-style war crimes trial. Gore has used the phrase “global warming deniers” to describe scientists and others who don’t share his view of the Earth’s climate. It remains to be seen what Gore and Moyers will have to say about proposals to make skepticism a crime comparable to Holocaust atrocities.

If Gore and Moyers are smart, they’ll keep their mouths shut and pretend they’ve never heard of Mr. Roberts. This won’t be too difficult due to the fact that few serious people have heard of Grist Magazine whose internet tag line is “Doom and Gloom with a sense of Humor.”

Yeah. Pretty funny.

Roberts himself is something of a newt:

David was born and raised in the South. A revelatory summer working in Yellowstone National Park convinced him that it was not the world, but just the part where he lived, that sucked, so he moved out West. After way too many years in Montana pursuing graduate degrees in philosophy (no, really), he was lured out of the academy by the siren song of the heralded internet “boom”—about six months too late. He was sinking ever further into the Seattle swamp of tech work, having already hit Amazon.com, IMDb.com, and Microsoft, when the fine folks at Grist threw him a life preserver in December 2003. (Total profits from stock options: $57. Meaningful work: priceless.)

What we have hear ladies and gents is a gen-ew-wine, dyed in the wool, bona fide moonbat. In fact, the blurb about placing global warming skeptics on trial in some kind of international forum is given after Robert’s enthusiastic response to a book on global warming written by none other than George Monbiot.

That’s right. The namesake of the sobriquet “moonbat” inspired one of his disciples to prove just how truly moonbatty he really is by advocating putting on trial people who disagree with him.

I love it when life serves up little tidbits of irony like that. Almost makes one want to believe in the fates. Or at the very least, destiny.

Is this attitude widespread among the advocates for drastic action on climate change? Probably not so with scientists. But listening to Al Gore recently and his global warming “deniers” rhetoric, one gets the sense (well..one always gets the sense with Gore) that he’s about ready to fall of the deep end. Gore takes rejection of his pet theories the same way a schizophrenic takes someone challenging his visions of demons perched on the shoulders of people sitting next to him on the subway.

When someone tries to explain to the mentally ill that their delusions are nothing more than a manifestation of the symptoms of their sickness, they earnestly try and convince the skeptic that yes indeed, you have a little man with horns and a tail standing on your shoulder as we speak and he’s whispering into your ear right now. For Gore and many of his global warming warriors, this kind of crazed earnestness brooks no opposition and overcomes any latent intellectual curiosity they may have about the subject.

Indeed, this idea that global warming skeptics are no better than climate nazis is becoming more and more acceptable among the Luddites, the greenies, the greedy NGO’ers (who profit most handsomely by advocating governmental “solutions” to global warming), and that small subset of westerners who, bored to tears as the result of accumulated fame and wealth, seek out other avenues to relieve their ennui. The fact that people actually listen and take seriously drug addled actors, musicians, and the like on such an enormously complex subject like global warming tells you how far western civilization has fallen in the last decade or so.

In fact, among the more level headed advocates for global warming – scientists who might know a thing or two more than Al Gore about the subject – this political tactic is odious:

The use of Holocaust terminology has drawn the ire of Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. “The phrase ‘climate change denier’ is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denier,’” Pielke, Jr. wrote on October 9, 2006.

“Let’s be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system,” Pielke, Jr. explained.

I too, over the last year or so, have become convinced that human behavior is responsible for at least some of the rise in temperature we’ve seen this century. But you can still color me a skeptic regarding catastrophic climate change. And it doesn’t help when people like Al Gore are either too ignorant to know any better or lie through their teeth about the state of the current debate over global warming. Roy Spencer:

As part of the current media frenzy over the “imminent demise” of Planet Earth from global warming, it has become fashionable to demonize global warming skeptics through a variety of tactics. This has recently been accomplished by comparing scientists who don’t believe in a global climate catastrophe to “flat-Earthers,” those who denied cigarettes cause cancer, or even those who deny the Holocaust.

It is interesting that it is not the scientists who are making the comparisons to Holocaust-deniers, but members of the media. For instance, Scott Pelley, who recently interviewed NASA’s James Hansen for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” has been quoted on the CBS News PublicEye blog saying:

“There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about ‘global warming.’ … The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive.”

Pelley also posted this quote to the same blog:

“If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

In fact, as Spencer points out, there is enormous disagreement over many, many aspects of global warming across the scientific community. About the only issues there seems to be a consensus on are that it is getting warmer and that mankind plays a yet undetermined role in the process. Beyond that, there is an emerging consensus that the burning of fossil fuels may be the engine driving the climate spike. This position has been vigorously challenged by dozens of respected meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, and other scientists who wonder that if this is so, where the hell did all the CO2 go? It isn’t where it’s supposed to be (in the lower atmosphere) nor is it anywhere that it can be reliably measured. The models are all screwed up which have sent the physicists scrambling back to their drawing boards looking for a reason.

Ultimately, the biggest global warming skeptics are the scientists themselves. Even those who are part of the global warming consensus on climate change are constantly challenging their own assumptions, their own conclusions. This is what a good scientist does. Perhaps Roberts and Monbiot should start their show trials with them. If they are apostates in any way, doubting Thomases who question the dominant groupthink on catastrophic global warming, perhaps they can keep them in line by threatening them with star chamber proceedings.

Those of us who may not be scientists but who follow the debate with an open mind realize that bullies like Gore and the rest of the agenda driven left who seek to use the issue of global warming to initiate drastic economic and societal changes had to bring up Hitler sooner or later. It is their answer for everything and everyone who disagrees with them.

And it is getting very, very, old.