"I Just Wish The Global Warming Debate Was More Civil"

Climate shill Gavin Schmidt gave us the phrase that sums up the second-handedness of the global warming "consensus": his lament that Climategate has loosened the establishment's ability to dictate what can be said by "people who want to be thought of as having respectable ideas."

Here's an example of that process: an article in the Australian newspaper The Age, which our antipodean correspondent Tom Minchin informs me is written by a pro-alarmist author in a pro-alarmist newspaper. The whole point of the piece is to make excuses for the global warming establishment—but notice that the author finds it necessary to denounce the reflexive dismissal of "skeptics" and to quote from some them.

Why? Because this is what must now be done by "people who want to be thought of as having respectable ideas."

What I found most amusing was the ending quote from a global warming alarmist who whines that "I just wish the debate could be more civil." I had two responses for that. The first was: "too late." Maybe he should have wished for a more civil debate before skeptics were denounced as flat-earthers and compared to Holocaust deniers.

But more broadly, I have to ask: what does he expect? This isn't an academic debate. It's a contest of force in which his side wants to seize trillions of dollars and restrict human freedom across the globe. It's not a very "civil" thing to do—and he shouldn't expect a civil response.

"Warming's Icy Debate," Adam Morton, The Age, February 13

The latest heatwave follows a 2009 that the World Meteorological Organisation reports was our fifth warmest around the globe and second hottest in Australia. Not long ago these sorts of statistics would have been broadly accepted as part of a wider narrative summed up by the UN's climate panel in 2007: that the evidence the planet is warming is unequivocal and that we can be more than 90 per cent confident that most of the warming is due to human greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, the story told to an only partially engaged public is less clear. Two events have colluded to etch a question mark in some minds as to whether the world faces a potentially catastrophic future.

First, there was "Climategate"—thousands of emails leaked from the British University of East Anglia's world-leading Climatic Research Unit that, depending on how you interpreted them, suggested senior scientists had manipulated data and tried to suppress dissenting research.

This was followed by "Glaciergate"….

Many of the criticisms go much further than just suggesting flaws. On the internet, the fight over climate change has become a vicious brawl in which the IPCC panel is dismissed as corrupt, the science of climate change has been proven false and the thousands of scientists who volunteer their time to help write and review the panel's reports are part of a giant scam….

Somewhere in all this, the language of scientific debate has been perverted.

"Skeptic" has been misappropriated to mean unswerving non-believer. Non-believers are often tagged as deniers, an ugly term that equates them with those who refuse to accept that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

On the other side, those who put the case that climate change is a man-made problem—the view of an overwhelming majority of the editors of leading scientific journals, the world's scientific academies and governments—are derided as alarmists or, ludicrously, warmists….

Critics such as William Kininmonth—a former head of Australia's National Climate Centre and prominent dissenter from the IPCC's conclusions—say the international panel should be abandoned….

Others prefer a revamp. Former lead author John Christy, from the University of Alabama, suggests the IPCC is dominated by like-minded scientists and marginalizes dissenting views….

Christy said this week: "The truth, and this is frustrating for policymakers, is that scientists' ignorance of the climate system is enormous," he wrote. "There is still much messy, contentious, snail-paced and now, hopefully, transparent work to do."…

Nicholls….says: ''My responsibility is to explain the science in as fair and balanced way as I can, with all the caveats and qualifications. And that is where my responsibility ends. I just wish the debate could be more civil."



Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal