Good Morning, Leonardo

You used your supreme moment to deliver the most embarrassingly gutless pretense at courageous crusading since my great Uncle Clarence spit at John Scopes and Clarence Darrow, and yelled, “Up with the truth!” outside that courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee.

Great to see you up there, as you deserve to be for killing that bear with a Bowie knife. As you know, I had my criticisms of The Revenant because of its elevation of savage—you know, Leonardo, “Native American”—culture into beautiful religion. I know I can say this to you because we are old friends. I’m sure you remember that fan letter I wrote to you in, I think, 2006.

Leonardo, friends have to be frank. You deserved that Oscar for a 200 percent performance in The Revenant, doing those shoots in rough climates, with no babes in the script. I read that you agreed to eat bloody, putrid meat to give things authenticity. I love it, Leonardo, but I’m writing to say, “There is some shit I will not eat”—I’m sure you get the reference to the poem, “I sing of Olaf,” by e e cummings.

Let me presume upon our friendship. You used your supreme moment to deliver the most embarrassingly gutless pretense at courageous crusading since my great Uncle Clarence spit at John Scopes and Clarence Darrow, and yelled, “Up with the truth!” outside that courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee.

I mean, jeez, guy, you didn’t even have to talk about “global warming.” Your movie falls into the politically correct film category: Native Americans. You could have said something nice about bringing them into the mainstream of American society—growing up, getting off the firewater, that kind of thing.

I mean, jeez, guy, you didn’t even have to talk about “global warming.” Your movie falls into the politically correct film category: Native Americans. You could have said something nice about bringing them into the mainstream of American society—growing up, getting off the firewater, that kind of thing.

Instead, you stand up there, with your sharp New Orleans slave-trader hairdo and facial hair, and that advertisement-for-solar-power tan on your face, and make a born-again speech about the most politically correct piece of holy writ in Hollywood. Your eyes are blazing, your fist is clenched, you have that off-my-meds stare. You look as though you are defending Dreyfus, or standing up for the Jews at an SS convention, or appealing to a lynch mob in Alabama in 1920. Sorry, Leonardo, I should explain. All those are examples of really courageous things to say at times when they urgently and desperately need saying. And only brave men say them.

Leonardo, you are a fine actor and my friend, but I see you up there splitting a vein for the GREAT ORTHODOXY. You may not recall this morning what you said, because it was a sort of Hollywood necklace of buzz words. Maybe you should have just listed them and given the clenched fist salute after each one: “collectively felt,” “urgent threat,” “entire species,” “work collectively,” “all of humanity,” “indigenous people,” “underprivileged people,” “our children’s children,” “voices drowned out,” and, of course, “the politics of greed.” I think you’ve got almost a dozen applause lines there. In fact, I tried to think of just one that you might add, but damned if I could; you got every single one. Not that the order matters much, here, in this strung of clichés:

…We collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.

Leo, you slipped up there by asserting an actual, checkable statement—the only one—that 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history. Not even close, Leo. This little head fake, based on doctored data, lasted about one week before it was obliterated by criticism. Leo, you aren’t supposed to remember these things. The goal of such assertions is to get you panicked for your children’s children or the whole species. Then, you don’t notice—certainly not in anything you read—all the follow-on commentary that obliterates the head fake. You are left with just the fear.

Not you, Leo. You use it in front of the biggest TV audience since, I don’t know, maybe the moon landing. It wasn’t the hottest year even in 20 years. That was 1998. It is just that 2015 should have been the warmest year because we had a record El Niño that scientists expected to create a record high. Nope. Big disappointment for Greenpeace, which had been waiting for one warmer year in the 18 years since 1998. No luck, even with El Niño, in 2015. I guess Greenpeace just decided to claim that it was.

If you want science, not Greenpeace PR, then the evidence from ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica, and other scientific methods, shows that temperatures were significantly warmer than today for most of the past 10,000 years.

And you use your big moment to repeat this global warming version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You know, that hateful historical example of a grand libel intended to condemn the Jewish people isn’t such a bad analogy with “global warming,” a grand libel intended to condemn capitalism and industrial civilization itself.

Leo, why not just grin and say, “We’re all advocates of global warming, here, my friends; our minds think exactly alike; I haven’t seen a dissenter in Hollywood since the last ice age. So let me just say: I agree, I agree with everyone—‘I’m correct—you’re correct’—and if ANYONE disagrees, he will never, ever get invited onto my private plane or my yacht, or to my mega-mansion…”

All of which have the dainty carbon footprints of Godzilla, Leo. Sorry for the capital letters, I got stirred up talking about dissent. You don’t spend time reading about “global warming,” being as how it is self-evidently true, that 2015 was a scorcher beside your pool in Hollywood, and that you take science lessons at cocktail parties. But being my good friend, you might read an article I wrote.

Here is this brilliant Chinese-American climate scientist, Wei-Hock Soon, working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Been there 25 years, published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers in his field.

Well, recently, he and other scientists, after an investigation, publish a paper. Although Dr. Soon always has published in American peer-reviewed journals, this one appears in a new Chinese scientific journal because you cannot, CANNOT publish scientific dissent against global warming in United States journals. It just isn’t done.

The title of the article is “Why Models Run Hot: Results from an Irreducibly Simple Climate Model.” The paper identifies flaws in the computer models that predict dangerous global warming and concludes that, due to mathematical errors, the models systematically overstate the impact of CO₂ on the climate by a factor of three hundred percent.
Overstate the impact of CO₂ on the climate by a factor of three hundred percent.

Leo, do you know what they are saying? “Overstate the impact of CO₂ on the climate by a factor of three hundred percent.”
Give me a call if you have trouble understanding that, Leo.  It isn’t more complex than “the greatest threat to our entire species,” but it actually has content.

I don’t ask you to accept this, Leo. You would have to examine the evidence, the math, behind this conclusion. And since you haven’t examined the evidence, the math, behind the “global warming” assertion, where do you start?

My point is that within days after this article was published, long before ANY peer-reviewed scientific commentary on it, Dr. Soon is assaulted on the front page of the New York Times. Well, but the Times is prestigious enough, right? Yeah, but a week after THAT, Times reporters publish more or less word-for-word a press release from Greenpeace, one of the wealthiest, most fanatical environmental lobbying groups on Earth. Other newspapers join in. The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and, OMG, Scientific American jump in with almost identical articles. Very successful Greenpeace press release.

So cheer up. These are science reporters from highly reputable national publications, and they are as idiotic as… Well, we ARE friends…
Next thing, based on this press-herd stomping, the board of directors of the Harvard-Smithsonian announces that Dr. Soon is “under investigation.” This has nothing to do with any analysis of his views in the paper—or that for over 25 years the Harvard-Smithsonian has not objected to his work, but has celebrated it. It has to do with the Greenpeace allegation that Soon received some funding for his research from polluters. Well, not polluters, exactly, but philanthropic foundations funded in part by the energy industry. Well, actually, these grants were not to Dr. Soon; they were to the imperiously ethical Harvard-Smithsonian, which is the one that decides how to use them to fund whom. Some of those funds supported Dr. Soon’s work. But not his work on the article under attack; for that, he refused support, knowing any funder would be crucified right up there beside him.

And, of course, the behemoths of U.S. government funding of scientific research, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, spend BILLIONS to support research that confirms, over and over, global warming. They will not, NOT, make a grant to investigate any seriously contrary hypothesis, although it be proposed by scientists whose work they long have supported. Greenpeace also supports research on “global warming”—no Times attacks on that, as far as I’ve seen.

Leo, I have not argued that Dr. Soon and his colleagues, all distinguished climate scientists, are correct that the method of measuring global warming yields a 300 percent overstatement of the contribution of CO₂—that is, human activity—to any possible global warming.

But, when you mount that platform to accept your Oscar, and deliver your rousing call to arms in the name of poor, besieged global warming, clutching your Oscar in your fist and almost banging your head with it, you are crusading against Dr. Soon and the handful of scientists like him as the perilous enemy—wrong and KNOWN by ALL to be wrong—that must be crushed. Leo, that’s like standing at the edge of a crowd at a lynching, raising your fist, and yelling, “String him up higher”—and pretending to stand up for a hard-pressed cause. Why not just accept this magnificent acknowledgment that you are at the top of your profession and you kill bears like Davy Crockett? You didn’t have to be the Big Swinging Dick of Hollywood political correctness.

I’m almost done, Leo. Today, you must be snowed under, swept down the rapids, shaken by a grizzly. That is why I appreciate your reading this.
By the way, I have sent you 23 letters since 2006, proposing movie ideas. You have not responded. I’m sure you read them, Leo, but it would be nice to hear from you once a decade, you know.
Okay, clear your mind and picture this. If you like it, maybe I work it up into a full scenario, huh?

“You know, my friends, I just completed a movie about the harrowing dangers and pitiless suffering of a man who does not have the protections of civilization. That is the truth of The Revenant. A man faces nature without the creations of man’s mind:  industry, science, all the gifts of man’s inventiveness that make our lives in America an unimaginable luxury. But abroad, today, in America and the world, is a dogma that would destroy that industry and science, the fruits of man’s inventiveness and enterprise.

A great, virile actor is at the top of his profession. He just did a movie about rising from the dead. Now, he is alive and looking good on an evening of indescribable glitter, glamour, and glory—or, at least, high audience ratings. He mounts the platform to accept the ultimate accolade of his profession. He is dressed and groomed to perfection with his deep mountain-man tan on oddly unweathered skin.

Before the world, he reaches for this acknowledgment. He has a minute or two to say something courageous, a truth few have heard, words justice demands, words spoken from the promontory. He starts in his thoughtful, matter-of-fact tone. “You know, my friends, I just completed a movie about the harrowing dangers and pitiless suffering of a man who does not have the protections of civilization. That is the truth of The Revenant. A man faces nature without the creations of man’s mind:  industry, science, all the gifts of man’s inventiveness that make our lives in America an unimaginable luxury.

“But abroad, today, in America and the world, is a dogma that would destroy that industry and science, the fruits of man’s inventiveness and enterprise. Destroy them in the name of a hypothesis based on weather forecasting—[laugh line, here, Leo]—and, to boot, long-term weather forecasting—[another laugh line].

“This theory, called ‘global warming,’ is a classic case of popular mania, one of those outbreaks of fanaticism-as-science that periodically burn out of control through populations. It is presented as science, but it is not. It is true belief. A dead giveaway to this is that today scientific dissent from the ‘global warming’ dogma is denounced, derided, starved of funding, and the dissenters are punished by banishment from the profession.

“Some time ago, a man, about my age, a Chinese scientist called Willie Soon, who has worked for two-and-a-half decades at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Laboratory, published a scientific paper with colleagues. That paper, if its conclusions are correct, guts the hypothesis that man’s industrial activities cause so-called ‘global warming.’
“Even as I am being honored, tonight, that courageous scientist is being destroyed by forces that would reverse the Industrial Revolution in the name of science.
“Friends, I beg of you, tune your ears not to the choirs of consensus of scientific orthodoxy, monopolistic government funders, and today’s sorrowful toadies of the American press. Let us tune our ears to brave, lonely, and heroic dissent. Let us hear Willie Soon, whether or not in the end he is proved right or wrong, and others who dissent in the name of reason and science. I would like to dedicate this Oscar, tonight, to the heroic in all men whose independent thought alone can move civilization forward. The Revenant is a story of a man alone against his most terrible enemy: the natural environment untamed by human reason and industry.

“Thank you.”

What do think, Leo? Do we have a winner?

Related Posts:

1. Objectivist Standards for Rating Presidential Candidates
2. How an Orthodoxy Prejudices Scientists
3. The New Indictment: Humans Are Polluting Wildlife’s “Senses”

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.