Silencing dissent

Because he eschews facts and deals in reputation, Clive has almost confined himself to the ad hominem. How else can he argue?

It also leads to him completely ignoring the substance of the article that we published, and he objected to, called "The UN climate change numbers hoax". The title might be a little over-stated (that's headlines for you), but the conclusions in the article are unsurprising. Anyone who has paid attention to the IPCC reports knows that the review process has its critics and that a number of the reviewers have complained about their comments being ignored. The advance in this article is that via FOI requests the process in one instance was completely laid bare.

As in the Henderson-Castles case the ethical thing to do is to fix the system, not shoot the messenger.

Clive then misrepresents people who are sceptical of aspects of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), likening them to people who say the earth is flat, or who deny a link between AIDS and HIV, or who see a world Jewish conspiracy, which is patently absurd.

He trots out untruths, such as the line that there are no peer-reviewed papers published by "denialists". Apart from the problematic nature of much of what passes for peer review, as highlighted by the Wegman Committee, high profile sceptics such as McIntyre and McKitrick, Roy Spencer, Hans Svensmark, and Roger Pielke sr, to name but a few, regularly publish in peer reviewed journals. He can apparently discover that one of our authors is, like he was, a lobbyist, but he can't turn-up a few peer reviewed journals.

Of course, a lot of Clive's argument isn't unethical, simply opportunistic or just plain muddled. For example, he claims that if we publish something we endorse it. "… [E]ach time On Line Opinion runs one of their pieces it is, inter alia, endorsing their view that Australia's most eminent climate scientists are frauds and liars." So, by publishing his article we are doing what? Endorsing his view that we are in decline?

Clive has a lot of problems with the concept of balance. He appears to think that because according to his view of the world, the overwhelming bulk of scientists disagree with the "denialists" then we should only print majority-approved science. Apart from the fact that science doesn't work by majority consensus, that is not the way that argument works either. Thesis and anti-thesis is what we are about, and it is hard to do that any other way than 50:50.

We do have an editorial stance on what is publishable, and the test is that it must be arguable, not that it must necessarily be true. The Greenhouse material that we have published fits that category, on both sides of the fence. Clive asks whether I would publish "Larouche delusions about the Royal Family being in cahoots with global Jewry to run drugs". I do get this sort of material sent to me by the Citizens Electoral Council, but my spam filter copes with it very well. It is not within our ambit.

Clive also misunderstands the role that newsworthiness takes in the editorial process. There is no news in just reporting the status quo. When the latest IPCC report was released, consensus views were more newsworthy, because there was new information. Since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and the Stern Review most of the developments have been on the sceptical side of the argument. Clive's exploited the news cycle before in the past to get his own minority views up as The Australia Institute strove to change the status quo. he shouldn't be surprised when others do the same, or when honest publishers like us publish them.

It's a pity that Clive is going. He's capable of getting arguments right even if he's made a hash of them in this case, and certainly his positions have a place on OLO, even though I rarely agree with them. In this case he's given me an opportunity to state just what On Line Opinion is about, which is something I don't get to do often enough. He's also demonstrated how neglected, even in universities, the traditional arts of analysis and argument are.

The idea that truth is relative has taken over some areas of the humanities through postmodernism, theory and forms of Marxist analysis. That's the school that Clive's argument on global warming comes from. Reading his article, and the comments on the article thread, they really don't cut it in the outside world. We instinctively know that things do have objective reality and are not power constructs. That it doesn't matter how many people say it is true if it isn't. It's in that place in the intellectual debate that On Line Opinion fits. We're not in demise or denial. We're just starting to come into our own.