Matt Ridley: “The climate change lobby wants to kill free speech”

Summary: This powerful article by Matt Ridley strikes at the heart of public debate about the public policy response to climate change. First, he describes the obvious and massive imbalance in financial resources: the skeptics have a pittance compared to the alarmists (e.g., compare their websites, standard templates with amateur writers vs. beautiful custom work with pro writers). Second, he describes how the alarmists are slowly applying their superior institutional power to limit the range of allowable public speech about climate. For these and other reasons I predict that the skeptics will lose (details here).

Pravda

 

The climate change lobby wants to kill free speech

By Matt Ridley
Excerpt from The Times on 25 April 2016
Posted with his generous permission

The editor of this newspaper received a private letter last week from Lord Krebs and 12 other members of the House of Lords expressing unhappiness with two articles by its environment correspondent. Conceding that The Timesโ€™s reporting of the Paris climate conference had been balanced and comprehensive, it denounced the two articles about studies by mainstream academics in the scientific literature, which provided less than alarming assessments of climate change.

Strangely, the letter was simultaneously leaked to The Guardian {who wrote about it on 21 April}. The episode gives a rare glimpse into the world of โ€œclimate change communicationsโ€, a branch of heavily funded spin-doctoring that is keen to shut down debate about the science of climate change.

The letter was not entirely the work of the peers but, I understand, involved Richard Black, once a BBC environment correspondent and now director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit {ECIU}, an organisation that spends more than ยฃ500,000 a year, largely trying to influence the media. {Red emphasis added.}

The ECIU is part of a self-described โ€œclimate change rapid response communityโ€, which jumps on newspapers that publish anything sceptical about global warming. Another ยฃ330,000 was spent by Carbon Brief, led by another ex-journalist, Leo Hickman of The Guardian. (Thereโ€™s a revolving door between environmental journalism and Big Green.) Then thereโ€™s the Climate Coalition, the Campaign against Climate Change, various publicly funded climate-communications groups inside universities, plus the green multinationals, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, with their nine-figure budgets. And so on.

Against this Goliath, one little David stands alone: the Global Warming Policy Foundation, with its budget of about ยฃ300,000, all privately donated and none from the fossil fuel industry. (I am on its academic advisory council, but receive no pay and make no donations. I have income indirectly from unsubsidised coal, and have refused income from subsidised solar and wind power.)

The GWPF often draws attention to the many studies ignored by greens that suggest climate change is not so dangerous, and to the economic and environmental harm done by climate policies. Remember the consensus is that global warming is โ€œlikelyโ€ to be anything from mildly beneficial to significantly harmful (0.3-4.8ยฐC this century). And predictions of doom usually prove exaggerated: eugenic deterioration, dietary fat, population growth, sperm counts, pesticides and cancer, mad cow disease, the effect of acid rain on forests.

โ€ฆIronically, two days before the letter was leaked, Lord Krebs rightly denounced in parliament a ham-fisted new government rule on not using public money to lobby government, because it could effectively censor scientists from saying inconvenient things. Yet here he seems to be saying that The Times should censor inconvenient stories.

This episode is part of a systematic campaign. When I cover this topic I am vilified as on no other subject, and many journalists now steer clear of expressing any doubts. As long ago as 2005, the Royal Society wrote to editors โ€œappealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate changeโ€, by which they did not mean the cherry-picked data and inappropriate statistics just then being exposed in the โ€œhockey-stickโ€ and โ€œhide the declineโ€ fiascos {details here}.

In 2006 the BBC held a secret meeting, after which it decided to limit the airtime given to climate sceptics. It spent ยฃ140,000 on hiring six lawyers to avoid revealing that the 28 โ€œbest scientific expertsโ€ who attended actually included only a handful of scientists remotely connected with climate among mostly environmental lobbyists.

In 2013 Ed Davey, then secretary of state for energy and climate change, said โ€œsome sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groupsโ€, by which he did not apparently mean The Guardian. In 2014 the BBC upheld a complaint against itself for allowing Lord Lawson to discuss climate change at all, commenting bizarrely that his views โ€œare not supported by the evidence from computer modellingโ€.

The Climategate emails leaked in 2009 revealed intimidation against academics and journal editors who voiced doubts about the forthcoming Armageddon. When Lennart Bengtsson, a distinguished climatologist, joined the GWPFโ€™s scientific advisory board in 2014, the pressure was so โ€œunbearableโ€ that he withdrew, worried about his health and safety, โ€œa situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthyโ€. Some distinguished scientists continue to brave the bullies, such as Judith Curry, Dick Lindzen, John Christy, Nic Lewis, Michael Kelly and David Legates, but others tell me they dare not put their heads above the parapet.

In 2013 The Los Angeles Times said it would โ€œno longer publish letters from climate change deniersโ€, in which category it included sceptics. The following year Professor Roger Pielke Jr quit Nate Silverโ€™s 538 website following a campaign against him. Professor Pielke had argued with impeccably detailed evidence that, although he was no sceptic, โ€œthe increased cost of natural disasters is not the result of climate changeโ€.

This month, the attorneys-general of 16 US states issued subpoenas against a think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an attempt to silence its climate dissent. The Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle lambasted this decision, saying: โ€œI support action on climate changeย โ€ฆ But that doesnโ€™t mean Iโ€™m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square.โ€

If peers demanded a newspaper stop covering studies that argue economic growth is going to fall short of the consensus, they would get short shrift. We canโ€™t criticise Russia or Turkey for shutting down newspapers if we censor scientific doubters. Free speech matters.

——————– End excerpt from this article ——————–

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Matt Ridley by Peter Walton.
Matt Ridley by Peter Walton, from his website.

About the author

Matt Ridley is a British journalist, a peer elected to the House of Lords, and author of several popular science books. He has BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University.

He was the non-executive chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, resigning after the the first run on a British bank in 150 years (leading to its nationalization).

Ridley has written seven books, including The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). See his bio for more information.

For More Information

Please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. For more information see The keys to understanding climate change, Myย posts about climate change, and especially these about the public policy debateโ€ฆ

  1. How we broke the climate change debates. Lessons learned for the future.
  2. My proposal: Climate scientists can restart the climate change debate โ€“ & win.
  3. We can end the climate policy wars: demand a test of the models.
  4. How climate change can help the GOP win in 2016.
  5. Important: Why skeptics will lose the US climate policy debate.

I recommend these two books by Ridley as well-worth reading

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
Available at Amazon.
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Available at Amazon.

2 thoughts on “Matt Ridley: “The climate change lobby wants to kill free speech””

  1. This is scary stuff and shows the shameful lengths activists go to silence things that offend them. The political left is exceptionally hypocritical for not decrying this cancer within its own ranks

    1. dpy6629,

      Left and Right are both Americans, and these trends are well-represented on both sides (in different issues). Each side clearly sees this in their foes, not in themselves. There is no reality-based community in America. The key to change is us: if we accept exaggerations, misrepresentations, and outright lies from our side (whatever that is), then that’s what we’ll get.

      1. Learning skepticism, an essential skill for citizenship in 21st century America.
      2. We cannot agree on simple facts and so cannot reform America.
      3. Our minds are addled, the result of skillful and expensive propaganda.
      4. Remembering is the first step to learning. Living in the now is ignorance.
      5. Swear allegiance to the truth as a step to reforming America.

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