Richard Parncutt

Richard Parncutt,  Professor of Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria, reckons people like Watts, Tallbloke, Singer, Michaels, Monckton, McIntyre and me (there are too many to list) should be executed. He’s gone full barking mad, and though he says these are his “personal opinions” they are listed on his university web site.

For all the bleating of those who say they’ve had real “death threats“, we get discussions about executing skeptics from Professors, wielding the tyrannical power of the state. Was he paid by the state to write these simplistic, immature, “solutions”? Do taxpayers fund his web expenses? (And what the heck is systematic musicology?)

Prof Richard Parncutt says:

“I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases…”

“Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.”

“GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.”

Consequences

If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.

Recant you foolish deniers or we’ll kill you! Yeah. Welcome to modern scientific debate.

Who should die? Anyone named on Desmog:

Much more would have happened by now if not for the GW deniers. An amazing number of people still believe that GW is a story made up by scientists with ulterior motives. For a long list of climate change deniers and their stories see desmogblog.

So the denier database becomes the “death list”. The list decided by PR experts on a funded smear site, who profit from marketing Green corporations.

But it’s ok, he includes a caveat where he says he didn’t say what I quoted above, so he can later pretend he isn’t discussing real deaths of real people:

Please note that I am not directly suggesting that the threat of execution be carried out. I am simply presenting a logical argument. I am neither a politician nor a lawyer. I am just thinking aloud about an important problem.

And we all feel so much better don’t we?

But seriously, Global warming deniers are the worst vermin on the face of the Earth, worse than holocaust deniers, tobacco deniers and worse than someone who bombs buildings and shoots children en masse:

I don’t think that mass murderers of the usual kind, such Breivik, should face the death penalty. Nor do I think tobacco denialists are guilty enough to warrant the death penalty, in spite of the enormous number of deaths that resulted more or less directly from tobacco denialism. GW is different. With high probability it will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.

Here’s how the deadly reasoning goes

How does he know we are facing disaster?

He knows, because he’s read a blog that pretends to be scientific and it says so. The same site resorts to ad homs, and kindergarden namecalling (like “denier” and “Christie Crocks”) and is debunked all over the internet, but the Prof is too poorly trained in reasoning to spot the cheap tricks, and he didn’t think to search for “SkepticalScience debunked”. Oops.

His killer “maths” (if you could call it that)

… given the inherent uncertainty surrounding climatic predictions, even exaggerated accounts must be considered possible, albeit with a low probability. Consider this: If ten million people are going to die with a probability of 10%, that is like one million people dying with a probability of 100%.

He repeats this:

For the purpose of argument, let’s give the GW deniers the benefit of the doubt and imagine that the scientists are wrong with a high probability, say 90%. If they are right, some 100 million people will die as a direct result of GW. Probably more like a billion, but this is a conservative estimate. If the probability of that happening is only 10%, then effectively “only” 10 million people will die. These are the numbers that GW deniers are playing with while exercising their “freedom of speech”.

So even if “Deniers” are right, they are still murderous and should still be executed. Ooo-K

Apparently it didn’t occur to him that if skeptics are right, and the world doesn’t warm, hardly anyone will die from global warming. That’s “zero”, right?  (I know children in infants-school who can get this.)

Worse, the failure of his theory could kill far more people than the failure of skeptics: hundreds of thousands of people in the third world have already starved as we fed their corn into cars, kids are suffering from green pollution in Brazil, others will die waiting for medicine or mosquito nets while we build sea walls to hold back a tide that may never come. Others are suffering a life of blindness, dysentery, malaria, or dehydration and could be cured if we spend money on doctors, or clean water supplies, rather than solar farms. If the world cools and we are not prepared, millions will starve from wheat crops that were killed by frost.

How meaningless is a Professorship at a university these days? Where “higher education” doesn’t teach people to reason, doesn’t teach them the value of free speech, and doesn’t teach them the humility to say nothing when they know nothing.

I don’t think it’s worth writing to a man who can’t reason, but there are people at his university who need to know what Parncutt is saying. Is the University of Graz a serious university?

Prof Parncutt also thinks we need global taxes on wealth (guess that means a global bureaucracy, to manage those global funds?). Since he recommends The World Future Council, that’s a red-flag, I recommend skeptics read it carefully. They say they’re the voice of future generations. But they’re not speaking on behalf of my descendants.

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H/t to Andy Wilkins. Thank you.

UPDATE: Page disappears but we have a copy

AS this spreads through the skeptic world, the web page has been pulled down. Luckily  (in a strange use of the word) Tallbloke has a copy of the whole page as it was, So you can still read it. WUWT has a discussion too, and Anthony was prescient enough to save those pages before the University blitzed them. Thank him for the webcite link.