Argument by ridicule is not just something that happens, it’s the main approach:
“In the old days we would have drowned a
witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed
Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong
for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey),
“headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord
Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).
What can these sceptics have been doing
that so annoys the great and the good? They sound worse than terrorists.
Actually, sceptics have pretty well all been purged already: look what
happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy at the BBC. Spot the sceptic
on the Climate Change Committee. Find me a sceptic within the Department
of (energy and) Climate Change. Frankly, the sceptics are a ragtag
bunch of mostly self-funded guerrillas, who have made little difference
to policy — let alone caused the floods.
On floods, the skeptics agree with the IPCC:
“Here’s what the IPCC’s latest report
actually says: “There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low
confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency
of floods on a global scale.”
No, 97% of “climate scientists” don’t agree it will be dangerous warming
“That consensus, by the way, has never
said that climate change will necessarily be dangerous. The oft-quoted
97 per cent agreement among scientists refers to the statement that
man-made climate change happens, not to future projections. No climate
change sceptic that I know “denies” climate change, or even human
contributions to it. It’s a lazy and unpleasant slur to say that they
do."
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