Climate sceptics called every name in the book
Climate sceptics called every name in the book
BRENDAN O'NEILL From: The Australian September 03, 2011 12:00AM
HAS any intellectual current ever been so disparaged and demonised, so ferociously harangued by the chattering classes, as climate-change scepticism?
Every slur in the book has been hurled at those who dare to question climate-change orthodoxies.
They've been compared to Holocaust deniers. They've been branded psychologically disordered. They only use their "reptilian brain", says one eco-author, which means their outlook on climate change is not "modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought", Al Gore says.
And now, putting the icing on this cake of abuse, Gore has compared climate-change sceptics to racists.
In a recent interview he likened his present globetrotting war against climate change with his involvement in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Just as he and his buddies used to challenge racist chatter by saying to people, "Why do you talk that way? Don't talk that way around me", he says green-leaning folk must now do the same when they encounter nasty low-lifes who question climate change.
Related Coverage
Kids terrified by climate change lessons
Adelaide Now, 8 Jul 2011
Climate guru Ross Garnaut labelled 'eco-fascist''
Perth Now, 22 Jun 2011
A new Manne for the barricades
The Australian, 27 May 2011
Rudd pans climate-change sceptics
The Australian, 25 May 2011
Oakeshott rests carbon vote on evidence
The Australian, 28 Apr 2011
When his interviewer asked if there were any differences between being racist and doubting climate change, Gore said perhaps there were, but "they are the same where the moral component is concerned".
So there you have it: questioning climate change is the moral equivalent of being racist. Doubting the science of climate change or its many political spin-offs, from the idea that man should live more meekly to the demand for an end to development, is akin to hating a group of people on the basis of their skin colour.
And therefore it is incumbent on greens not to engage these science-denying, Klan-like toe-rags in actual debate but simply to say to them: "Don't talk that way around me."
That is, these backward people must be publicly upbraided at every opportunity, their words treated as wicked things that no decent person should have to listen to and be sullied by.
In Gore's lumping together of climate-change sceptics with racists, we can see what lies behind the liberal elite's shrieking intolerance of anyone who doesn't buy into the eco-outlook: a desire to depict their critics as morally warped.
The green movement is not content with arguing that its opponents are wrong. It wants to brand them as twisted, sinister and pernicious, spouting words that actually harm other people and society itself. In their determination to denude climate-change scepticism of any decency, greens ape every arch censor throughout history, from Torquemada to Joseph McCarthy, who likewise depicted certain people's ideas as a mortal threat to the social fabric.
The most striking thing about Gore's equation of dissent from climate-change orthodoxy with racism is the way it allows him to argue that such dissent should have no place in everyday social interaction.
He wants to make climate-change scepticism as disgusting as saying the N-word; he wants to deny the oxygen of respectability to an intellectual current he disagrees with.
So he calls on greens to "change the national conversation" by taking a tip from old civil rights activists: whenever you meet someone proffering climate sceptical ideas, you should immediately say, "Don't talk that way around me."
He's effectively calling for the subtle expulsion of climate sceptics from polite society, from the dinner-party circuit, from the media, so that nobody is forced to endure their apparently hateful ideas.
Gore isn't the first person to compare climate-change scepticism with racism.
Earlier this year John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerance of pseudoscience", including the alleged pseudoscience of climate-change scepticism.
In demanding "gross intolerance" of certain forms of scientific thinking, Beddington explicitly reveals the end result of comparing climate-change sceptics with racists: it allows you to argue that their ideas should not be tolerated in decent society.
Just as any of us would get angry if we heard someone making racist gibes and would feel inclined to tell them to "shut the hell up", apparently we should do the same with climate-change sceptics. Don't engage with them, don't debate them; just say, "Don't talk that way around me."
Others use the stigmatised category of Holocaust denial to try to rubbish climate-change sceptics. The insult "climate-change denier" is intended to lump eco-doubters together with the likes of British historian David Irving, who argues there was no Holocaust against the Jews.
As Margo Kingston argued following Irving's arrest in Austria on charges of Holocaust denial: "Perhaps there is a case for making climate-change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all."
The idea that climate scepticism is not only immoral but potentially criminal is gaining ground. British green Mark Lynas has fantasised about "future international criminal courts" handing down sentences to "those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths"; that is, climate-change sceptics. "I put [their words] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial."
As with Gore's cynical attempt to marshal the moral fury we feel towards racism in his war against scepticism, comparing sceptics with Holocaust deniers is intended to delegitimate them, to rob them of respectability.
As Charles Jones, an English professor at the University of Edinburgh, says, it's an attempt to assign them with "the same moral repugnance one associates with Holocaust denial".
When the green morality police are not branding sceptics morally repugnant, they are labelling them mentally ill. More and more greens are writing about the "psychology of climate-change denial".
According to eco-scribe John Naish, the problem is that people are using the "wrong brain": they too often think with their "reptilian brain, which is responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex", rather than with their "neocortex".
What we are witnessing is an attempt to pathologise dissent, to depict dissent not as a legitimate intellectual endeavour but as a kind of mental disorder or a creed as immoral as racism.
In their pathologisation, demoralisation and even criminalisation of dissent, greens unwittingly expose their deeply censorious, inquisitorial instincts.
Environmentalists often claim they aren't censors. They point out that they never bang on the doors of Big Government to demand that it pass laws forbidding the questioning of climate-change orthodoxy.
No, they do something worse than that.
They relentlessly depict climate scepticism as morally repugnant to encourage decent people to be "grossly intolerant" of it.
They invite each and every one of us to transform ourselves into everyday censors who should never debate with sceptics but simply say to them: "Don't talk that way around me."