HARVEY AND THE KLEIN DOCTRINE.

On Monday, in my capacity as a Twitter watchdog over the general ideological health of the planet, I spotted a dispatch from Naomi Klein. As readers may know, when it comes to the ideological health of the planet, my advice would be to steer clear of Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and other prescriptions for Dr. Green Statism to conduct full head transplants on the body politic and the global economic system.

The winds and rains from Hurricane Harvey were battering Houston, so Klein sensed an opportunity to cash in on a timely disaster. She sent around a tweet to her followers, but directed at one group: “Any journalists looking for climate experts to interview about #Harvey should read this piece, some very clear and credible voices in it.”

Before we get to the details of Klein’s effort, what seems clear about Harvey is this: it’s not the first time Houston has been underwater from hurricane action; Harvey ranks something like 15th-worst in the history of hurricane landfalls in the United States; it’s the first Category 4 to strike in 12 years, despite global-warming theories; damages will set a record, but that is to be expected, especially since nobody in Houston appears to have paid any attention to warnings of hurricane and flood risk over the last three decades of exploding development.

None of this was part of Klein’s tweet agenda on Monday. The piece she had directed journalists to was a report in The Atlantic, which asked the question “Did Climate Change Intensify Hurricane Harvey?” and provided the answer: “The human contribution can be up to 30 per cent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm.”

Coincidentally, I had sent a tweet of my own, just moments before: a Harvey-related commentary by Judith Curry, an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry’s view was that “Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

I therefore responded directly to Klein, suggesting that journalists might also consult Curry’s comments. “Or they could read this,” I said, linking to Curry’s article. Seemed like a reasonable proposal, a little pro and con: a debate, a discussion.

Then came Klein’s followup tweet: “Or you could watch this,” with link to something else entirely: A two-minute video Klein commentary posted a month ago on the BBC website. In the video, Klein makes the argument that “professional commentators, like newspaper columnists, should have term limits,” like U.S. presidents. “There are prominent newspaper columnists who have been pontificating continuously since the decade before I was born.” She was all for job security, Klein said, “but nobody has the right to do the exact same job forever.”

To solve this hitherto unknown rights abuse, Klein proposed that after eight years on the job, columnists and other long-in-tooth commentators should be forced to compete with other columnists and submit to some kind of public vetting. Time to “move over and make room for fresh opinions,” said Klein — as if opinions were as changeable as fashion colours and supermarket produce.

Some have since said that Klein’s proposal was not serious. She was joking. Maybe, but as I recall from my reading of Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate — and having followed her work through well beyond her own term limits as a leftist crank — humour is not a big part of her repertoire. When Klein proposes submitting aging columnists she doesn’t like for review before some undefined tribunal — other than the market for free expression — I think she’s serious. God help me if I had suggested publishers stop publishing her books and others by other writers of equal menace. Remember Klein’s infatuation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez?

Getting back to Harvey, it is instructive to compare the two conflicting items that formed the basis for the tweet clash.

Klein’s recommended Atlantic article claimed climate change is responsible for the intensity of the hurricane’s rainfall. It quotes as authority one Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U. S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “The human (- caused climate change) contribution can be up to 30 per cent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm,” said Trenberth. He said the hurricane stirred climatewarmed waters up to 200 metres deep in the Gulf of Mexico, allowing the storm to keep growing and carry more water.

The deepwater theory was also elaborated by Michael Mann, one of America’s leading climate science activists — although he qualified the conclusion. Harvey, he said, is “almost certainly” more intense than it would have been in the absence of human-caused global warming.

Mann and Trenberth have sparred with Curry in the past. In congressional hearings, Mann called Curry a climate denier, then denied that he had. As for Trenberth (who was part of a political campaign to have climate skeptics charged with racketeering), Curry recounted a 2014 debate she had with him in a blog post.

It went like this: Curry told Trenberth she regarded “presentations like his to be propaganda.” And, recalls Curry, “When Trenberth answered a question citing a bunch of ‘facts,’ I said that there are very few facts in all this; there are incomplete and ambiguous observations, theories and hypotheses, and models that don’t work very well. Trenberth responded ‘ That’s rubbish.’”

Mann and Trenberth — and Klein — are using the Harvey disaster as a prop. University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. summed it up nicely. “There is no reason to be debating Harvey and climate change in the context of an unfolding disaster, other than political opportunism and attention seeking.”

Who’s right and who’s wrong? We know this much: If Mann and Trenberth — and Klein and others — had their way, none of this could be written by any columnist past his term — or any dissenting scientist, for that matter. I just discovered I’m blocked from Mann’s Twitter feed.