How the climate lobby crushed debate – spiked
This demented insistence that The Science has spoken, that it has even issued demands, and that all those not bowing down before it are denying its truth, rests on a wilful misunderstanding of science and the role it ought to play in political debate.
All scientific claims should be subject to contestation, even those that many people happen to agree on. After all, there is sometimes a fine line between consensus and groupthink. The views of scientists and policymakers would surely be strengthened, not undermined, by rigorous public debate. But even if everyone takes as read that climate change is real and a problem, that is still not the end of the debate.
The numerous branches of scientific inquiry that constitute climate science can tell us many things about our changing environment. They can tell us about the complex interaction of sea and air temperatures. They can tell us about the state of biodiversity in our oceans and on our land. They can tell us about mankind s impact on the climate.
But they can t tell us what energy policies to pursue. They can t tell us what transport policies to implement. They can t, in short, tell us what we ought to do. That is something only we can decide. And to do so we need to be able to challenge and question the alarmist narrative. We need to be allowed to scrutinise those peddling certain approaches to climate change. And we need to be able to do so without being likened to Holocaust deniers, banned from social media or No Platformed by the BBC.
Presumably the reason why pro-Climate Change people are saying there may be no more debate is because if they allow debate some people may decide in fact there is something to the anti-climate change or anti-extreme climate change position, and so debate should go on. So it’s rather like euthanizing a patient out of fear that he may recover.
Furthermore, there’s still plenty to debate even if you agree that people are causing big climate change, namely, as the article suggests, what we should do about it. Of course, it turns out there’s to be no debate about that because we know the answer: Socialism! Even though it has never worked before! Actually it might work this time, since the goal presumably would be Misean destructionism, which would result in less greenhouse gases. There would be more methane from all the decaying bodies of the people who starved across the developing world, but that would be offset by more trees and Teslas round about where we live, I suppose.