"Eco-censorship"
In 2006 global-warming advocates (i.e., those who hold that the Earth is getting hotter and humans are the main cause) stepped up the PR campaign against their opponents by declaring that "the debate is over" and dubbing the skeptics as "deniers," explicitly linking them with those who deny the Holocaust. The intent is to end the debate by silencing the skeptics, or at least so discrediting them in the mass media that the doubters will be effectively banished from the public square. There have even been attempts by members of the U.S. Congress and the British Royal Society to pressure corporate contributors to stop funding research that casts doubt on global warming.
It's hard to say how effective this tactic has been. From what I see, the main effect has been to polarize the two sides even further: Those already predisposed to believe in global warming (per my loose definition above) now have fewer qualms about openly ostracizing their opponents, while the questioning skeptics have become ever more outraged about the attempt to silence and denigrate them.
In fact I'm starting to think that for the global warming side this tactic may be backfiring. Though the mantra of "the debate is over" has gotten lots of media play and its emphatic tone has probably swayed some of those who get their news from MTV, it looks to me like its greater long-term effect has been to energize those on the other side, resentful of the attempt to silence them. Examples from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Canada's National Post (the whole 10-part series is worth reading -- see links in the body of the article). Iain Murray provides a good description of what he terms "eco-censorship," and others are busy counter-attacking.
So where is the debate headed? At present the global-warming advocates have the mass media and political momentum going their way. But, in my contrarian mind, I think the tide may soon start running the other way. The next report of the IPCC (the U.N.'s climate-change panel) is due in May and early indications are that in the details (but probably not in its press releases) it will pull back from some of the more extreme views taken in past reports. The famous "hockey stick" temperature-rise graph, now discredited by further analysis of the data, will be gone from the report, and the panel is scaling back its temperature-rise and sea-rise predictions. In the meantime data keeps coming in to indicate that the real culprit may be changes in solar and cosmic-ray activity, which, if validated, would yank the debate from how we prevent global warming to how we adapt to it.
Aside: As one trained in astronomy, the solar- and cosmic-ray-effect hypothesis is of particular interest to me. The idea of solar fluctuations and cosmic-ray flux driving Earth's warming has not been widely discussed in the mass media, but it's been under serious discussion in the astronomy world for quite some time and it's not at all a crackpot idea. At present we don't have enough data to gauge the magnitude of these effects, but the mechanisms proposed are very real and there are some very interesting coincidences that the green-house gas theory does not explain, but solar and cosmic-ray effects do. This is one to watch.
Stay warm.
It's hard to say how effective this tactic has been. From what I see, the main effect has been to polarize the two sides even further: Those already predisposed to believe in global warming (per my loose definition above) now have fewer qualms about openly ostracizing their opponents, while the questioning skeptics have become ever more outraged about the attempt to silence and denigrate them.
In fact I'm starting to think that for the global warming side this tactic may be backfiring. Though the mantra of "the debate is over" has gotten lots of media play and its emphatic tone has probably swayed some of those who get their news from MTV, it looks to me like its greater long-term effect has been to energize those on the other side, resentful of the attempt to silence them. Examples from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Canada's National Post (the whole 10-part series is worth reading -- see links in the body of the article). Iain Murray provides a good description of what he terms "eco-censorship," and others are busy counter-attacking.
So where is the debate headed? At present the global-warming advocates have the mass media and political momentum going their way. But, in my contrarian mind, I think the tide may soon start running the other way. The next report of the IPCC (the U.N.'s climate-change panel) is due in May and early indications are that in the details (but probably not in its press releases) it will pull back from some of the more extreme views taken in past reports. The famous "hockey stick" temperature-rise graph, now discredited by further analysis of the data, will be gone from the report, and the panel is scaling back its temperature-rise and sea-rise predictions. In the meantime data keeps coming in to indicate that the real culprit may be changes in solar and cosmic-ray activity, which, if validated, would yank the debate from how we prevent global warming to how we adapt to it.
Aside: As one trained in astronomy, the solar- and cosmic-ray-effect hypothesis is of particular interest to me. The idea of solar fluctuations and cosmic-ray flux driving Earth's warming has not been widely discussed in the mass media, but it's been under serious discussion in the astronomy world for quite some time and it's not at all a crackpot idea. At present we don't have enough data to gauge the magnitude of these effects, but the mechanisms proposed are very real and there are some very interesting coincidences that the green-house gas theory does not explain, but solar and cosmic-ray effects do. This is one to watch.
Stay warm.
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