Silencing dissent

I'm an empiricist. Looking at the facts and theories, and seeing how predictive or not they were, has led me to hold the political beliefs that I hold. When the facts show me to be wrong, I change my mind.

So here we have another irony. While Clive has been keen to publish on OLO in the past, he has a hierarchical, authority-bound approach to argument which is quite at odds with our ethos. Because he deals in reputations, facts have no power over him, to change his mind or otherwise.

Another irony is that when I first looked for support in the early days of On Line Opinion I went to talk to Clive. I also approached the other two prominent think tanks at the time, the CIS and the IPA. The conversation with The Australia Institute proceeded over quite some time, but ultimately they declined to become institutionally involved. I was told that was because they could not support a site that represented the range of views that we did.

Other organisations do not have the same exclusivist claims to the truth, and you can see a list of them on our drop-down list of member institutions. These organisations contribute to the site on the understanding that views directly opposed to theirs will be published. That's what an open society is all about.

I have followed the Greenhouse issue as long as I can remember, certainly since the 60s. I have never had a problem with the proposition that increasing emissions of CO2 increase the earth's temperature. But I do have a problem with people trying to shut-down debate as to what sort of a problem this is, and what to do about it.

On Line Opinion first bought into the AGW debate in a significant way after I saw an IPCC press release criticising David Henderson and Ian Castles for suggesting that the IPCC emissions scenarios should calculate the size of different economies using purchasing power parity rather than market exchange rates. The IPCC denigrated these eminent men as "so-called experts".

It was obvious to me from my own knowledge of the concepts that Henderson, a distinguished economics professor, and Castles, a former head of the ABS, were correct and that a response like this meant that the IPCC knew they were and were trying to hide the fact. I solicited an article and we published it. For a while it was heavily cited as the only place you could read an accessible version of the Henderson-Castles critique. Was this an act of Greenhouse "denialism"? I have no idea what exactly this crude term means, but maybe Clive would say it was. The problem for him is that the Henderson-Castles critique is now pretty widely accepted, despite the IPCC's criticism at the time.

That's the first time we published scepticism that has since become accepted wisdom, but not the last. For example, here is an article on the notorious "hockey stick". I suspect that this essay by Jennifer Marohasy, reporting on Roy Spencer's work on the Aqua satellite results will be another.

Which leads to another irony. Clive has left his role as a spruiker and now fills a professional niche in a university. Not any niche, but one associated with ethics. Yet Clive hasn't made the leap. He doesn't appear to understand that what is acceptable from a lobbyist is not acceptable from an academic, particularly one who has set himself up to tell others what is right and wrong.

An ethical approach to argument avoids ad hominem attacks and concentrates on facts and arguments. It treats its opponent's arguments with respect, and doesn't misrepresent them, and it researches its own arguments thoroughly and presents them honestly.

Clive fails on all counts. His article is full of ad hominem diatribes. To take but one, the term "denialist" is a neologism, which derives from holocaust denial and seeks to insinuate that people who question Clive's orthodoxy are moral villains.

He also refers to me as an "emotional fanatic" without any shred of evidence.