The latest confirmation of how irrationally-off-the-reservation are many global warming doomsayers: Anglican Bishop Gordon Mursell has written that “not confronting global warming meant people were ‘as guilty as’ Josef Fritzl,” the BBC reports. Fritzl is the Austrian pedophile who kept his daughter (and three of the children he fathered by his daughter) locked in his basement for 24 years. I guess Bishop Mursell was not content with the February 2007 iteration by the Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman that GW-deniers are on par with Holocaust deniers, an association that has been with us ever since.

To say the very least, GW-alarmists’ comparisons of skeptics to Holocaust deniers and Josef Fritzl (and any similar analogies) are irrational and altogether unreasonable.

Every ounce of personal attack, of hyperbole, of overzealous appeal to emotion, and of reckless analogy is an ounce less of credibility for alarmists, an ounce less of legitimacy. If the GW crowd had a winning argument, then their argument alone would be sufficient — if not to convince the public and policymakers to react as the GW crowd would have them react, then at least sufficient to make their case. After that — after presenting their theory, their data, their arguments, their policy recommendations — it would be left for decision-makers to weigh their arguments against any and all other sides. Just like in a court of law: present your case to the best of your ability — make your arguments, call your witnesses, cross-examine the other side’s witnesses — and, after that, it’s in the judge’s/jury’s hands.

But what we get from GW alarmists does not come close to adhering to rational debate, discussion, and policy advocacy. We get screaming, we get pounding fists, we get eco-guilt, we get international derision, and we get vitriolic comparisons to the most heinous people and acts, past and present. Those who conduct themselves in such a way do not deserve a seat at the policy table for big boys and girls.