The Australian Attorney General George Brandis, a confirmed upholder of the climate change consensus, has lashed out at the large numbers of his fellow-travellers who seek to silence dissenters.
He said one of the main motivators for his passionate defence of free speech has been the “deplorable” way climate change has been debated and he was “really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers”.
“One side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong,” he said.
He referred to [Opposition leader Penny Wong] as standing up in the Senate and saying the science is settled as an example of climate change believers trying to shut down the debate.
“In other words, ‘I am not even going to engage in a debate with you.’ It was ignorant, it was medieval, the approach of these true believers in climate change,” he said.
In related news, the BBC's Feedback programme decided that environmentalist dismay at Lord Lawson's appearance on the Today programme needed a bit of an airing. Alex Cull has prepared a transcript here.
Jamie Angus: The BBC's reviewed its coverage of climate change and climate science, and it's set out some admirably clear guidelines for us to follow. We are able to put on air people who take a differing view from the majority view of climate science. However, that coverage should be proportional, and I think that any reasonable listener who listened to Today's coverage of climate change, across the past three months, would probably find that Lord Lawson was the only climate sceptic, if you like, who'd appeared in that period. And I think, you know, when Justin and I and the programme team discussed that interview, we thought we'd allowed it to drift too much into a straight yes-no argument about the science. And of course the settled view of the expert scientists is just that - settled, and I believe that our coverage reflects that, over the long term.
As a representation of the medieval approaches that George Brandis was talking about, this just about takes the biscuit. And the intellectual dishonesty that Jamie Angus has to engage in is something to behold.
Firstly there is the constant citing of "the science" without ever explaining what science is being referred to. Does the mean the greenhouse effect? That carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet? He will never tell us of course, because then his intellectual dishonesty would be revealed for all to see. He would either have to claim that all aspects of climate science are settled and would be instantly laughed into oblivion, or he would have to admit that the extent of any future warming and its impacts are scientifically highly tentative and that almost every scientist interviewed on the BBC would therefore by rights need to be challenged. But of course that can never be.
Then consider the bit where Jamie Angus claims that the Lawson-Hoskins segment moved into
a straight yes-no argument about the science. And of course the settled view of the expert scientists is just that - settled.
Now go and take a look at the transcript of that programme and see what it is they were discussing. In each and every case they were issues that were about as far as it is possible to get from "settled". Indeed, both interviewees agreed that this was the case - Hoskins said that "we just don't know" if the persistence of the winter rains was climate-related or not. The conversation moved onto weather extremes, yet nobody can seriously suggest that this is an area of settled science given all the IPCC's statements of "low confidence" about the existence of any trend, let alone attribution to mankind.
So the BBC persists in the great confidence trick that it plays on the public, refusing to define the "science" that is alleged to be settled.