climate change has somehow been constructed as a trojan horse through which politicians achieve goals or promote agendas by proxy…”

You missed the point rather…

A quick look at your profile at the Guardian reveals a series of articles, all of which are clearly designed, not to report on scientific discovery, but to rally support for environmentalism.

For example ‘Climate change experts reveal their hopes and fears’ – an attributed list of anonymous ‘scientific’ opinions about how soon the world will end. Unless we do… something…

Or, on the same day, you wrote that ‘Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed’ – which is a bullshit way of producing salacious copy, and its the worst possible form of bad science reporting.

More headlines:
-”Climate change experts call on G20 members to commit to action”
-”Green spending in UK economic rescue package ‘negligible’”
-”State intervention vital if Britain is to meet its green energy targets, says former BP boss”
-”National Grid chief calls for more renewables subsidies”
-”UK needs urgent ‘master plan’ on renewable energy, warns National Grid”
-”Warning over renewables as economic crisis leaves funding gap”
-”Leading climate scientist: ‘democratic process isn’t working’”
-”West Antarctic ice sheet could melt – again”
-”UK government carbon targets ‘too weak’ to prevent dangerous climate change, scientists say”
-”UK economic rescue plans ‘must be greener’, MPs say”
-”Climate change warning: ‘We’re sick of having our messages lost in political noise’”
-”Stern attacks politicians over climate ‘devastation’”

You are the proxy, it seems. Article after article after article of ‘scientists say…’, ‘experts agreee…’, ‘doesn’t go far enough…’, ‘politicians are wrong…’… Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. No Crisis, no story, no David Adam.

We weren’t in fact drawing a distinction between politicians and journalists. It’s the same process – both are disoriented and struggle to make sense of today’s world. There is a Caroline Lucas for every David Adam, and she probably reads his stories.

…you’re going to have to come up with some stronger examples that some critiques of newspaper articles on climate science

Let us make it clear…

1. You do not report on climate science. You make up alarming stories based on what a worst-possible-case implication of an unreviewed, single study might be – a crisis. You report opinion as fact without a hint of caution.
2. There are 241 other posts to this blog. Some of them look at how the media treat the climate debate. Some of them look at how politicians responded. Take your pick.
3. The problem is that you do not reflect on what you might be influenced by, and what kind of politics the disaster narrative is creating.

Either climate change is a serious problem that requires a serious political response, with all of its failings, to address or it’s not. I think it is. You seem to think not, fair enough. Like I said at the start, good luck.

You make it sound like ‘I like lemonade, you like tea’. But at least you finally seem to be twigging that your politics is prior to the way you report the science.

Why isn’t the government building nuclear reactors (which produce huge amounts of energy, without CO2 emissions) as fast as possible under emergency conditions, with a shoot-to-kill policy against any anti-nuclear protesters who try to get in the way?

If the alarmists were right about CO2-driven climate change it would be the obvious thing to do. Even if the reactors were very shoddily constructed, the alleged consequences of climate change are so cataclysmic that even multiple Chernobyl-level disasters per year would be peanuts in comparison.

This implies that either AGWCC is a hoax used as an excuse to micromanage people’s behaviour, or that our governments are dominated by evil cocksuckers who actually want a Malthusian catastrophe.

“Across the spectrum, there is a failure to sustain coherent political perspectives, and so the language of environmental crisis fills the void. Same with the pages of the Guardian.” – What does that even mean? That’s not nuance, it’s gobbledegook.

Okay, maybe we’ve overestimated you. Let us try a comparative example.

Many of the critics of the War on Terror have pointed to the failure of the Neo-conservative movement to sustain the legitimacy of their agenda as a driver of the Gulf intervention. Neo-conservative ideas weren’t capturing the public’s imagination. When the basis for a war turned up, it justified their functions: aggressive foreign policy and their failure to deliver domestic progress could now be explained. The emphasis that the hawks were making was on ‘security’. The same happened here – we were lead to believe that there was such a threat to Western civilisation itself that we needed to suspend our normal aspirations for the sake of survival. (This thesis is explored in Adam Curtis’s excellent series of films, The Power of Nightmares.)

We suggest on this blog that this ‘politics of fear’ is not unique to the WoT, and that it operates across the political spectrum – that all political parties have lost touch with their traditional political philosophies and accordingly lost touch with their traditional constituencies. Labour no longer represents labour, for instance. The political establishment – including all the main political parties – seem to be unable to sustain perspectives with which to engage the public. How can they? Losing touch with their political philosophies is equivalent to losing their identities – they appear increasingly indistinct. The possibility of ‘catastrophic climate change’ operates in this political environment in the same way as does the possibility of stone-age Jihadists exterminating the West. Conventional politics is thereby suspended for the necessity of surviving the crisis. (You may say ‘but climate change is real’. But so too could it be said that ‘terrorism is real’. The question is less about how ‘real’ the object of the political response is, and more about what is being brought to the process. What we argue is that politics is prior to science, and so it is essential to understand what prejudices and expectations we have of science before we attempt to understand what science is supposed to be ‘saying’.)

An example might be useful here. We’ve looked a lot at what emerges from Caroline Lucas’s campaign. Just today, for instance, Lucas argues today that intensive farming may have been responsible for the outbreak of bird flu, and now swine fever. Maybe so. But Lucas’s argument is premature. First, it is worth pointing out that neither viruses have manifested as ‘pandemics’ – normal flu kills many more people than either of these viruses have. Second, it is not as if aggressive viruses do not emerge from the ‘natural world’. HIV, Ebola, etc. Compared to problems the world faces from many other risks (malaria, for example, or even just crossing the road), the dangers so far evident from these viruses is minimal. Yet Lucas uses their potential in our imagination to make a case for her wider agenda. And she does so in the name of science. This is something she does with surprising regularity. For instance, we have found her, on two occasions using very dubious statistics linking ‘chemicals’ to instances of cancer on the basis that ‘Around 75 per cent of all cancers are caused by environmental factors, mainly chemicals…’. As a trained scientist, you will no doubt appreciate the absurdity of her wildly premature claims. At best, what she says is meaningless. But it is in fact highly emotive, amounting to a slogan – ‘vote for me, or get cancer’. All that Lucas’s political vision offers is survival in a hostile world, in which risk from industrial society is minimised at the expense of its benefits. If the war on terror reduces to an absurdity – a war on a concept – Lucas’s war is no more rational: it is a war on unquantified… unquantifiable… risk.

We find it interesting that the Guardian is rather keen these days on exposing Bad Science. And yet it is happy to indulge in its own BS, and to parrot others doing the same, while ignoring the rubbish spouted by the likes of Lucas, when it is politically expedient to its editorial agenda. And of course, Bad Climate Science is politically expedient. ‘Doing something’ about climate change is – for some strange reason – regarded as politically progressive. We don’t believe that this process of filtering good Bad Science from bad Bad Science is necessarily a conscious one. It is simply the result of passing off one’s political opinions as being justified by ‘the science’.

That is, we argue, because there is no human measure of progress operating in any of the political ideas in circulation – the desire is for measures of progress which are ‘objective’. Social progress is now measured in terms of its ‘sustainability’, for instance, not in terms of higher standards of living. Development is sacrificed for stability.

That is why we jumped on your coverage of the Copenhagen conference. We thought it a perfect example of how science journalism is less about informing an audience about developments in science, and has become more another means of promoting the idea of catastrophe.

We’re certainly not the only ones criticising the emphasis on catastrophe in science reporting. The Tyndall Centre’s Mike Hulme – an eminent and high-profile climate scientist, and certainly no ‘denier’ (although we wonder how long it will be before he is labelled as such) – has been saying it loudly for a year or two. In his new book, he also laments how political ideologies, beliefs and arguments hide behind science in climate debates. This is one reason we are so surprised that this all comes as such a surprise to you.

You suggest that we may be ‘making perverse challenge to scientific evidence driven by political, economic or pathological motives.’

The problem with this statement is that you make it as though you yourself were free from ‘political, economic or pathological motives’. As we try to explain above, you’re just not, and the only person who believes that you’re not is you. As we explain, hiding your subjective view of the world behind the objectivity of science merely betrays your inability to understand it and to make sense of it. The sense of impending doom may therefore be prior to anything that emerges from science, and owe far more to the fact that you appear to be looking so damned hard for it, to the exclusion of considering anything that might unsettle the certainty of imminent doom. So who is the ‘denier’?

And it’s exempified in your question ‘What part of the climate orthodoxy do you want to resist?’…

That greenhouse gas emissions are driving up the temperature? That as emissions continue the temperature will continue to rise with uncertain, but probably very serious impacts for millions of people? That reducing carbon emissions is the most obvious way to reduce those likely impacts? That cutting carbon emissions will require change in policy?

See, you’re doing it again. The climate change orthodoxy is a strange mish-mash of the scientific and the political. And, right on cue, here you flow seamlessly from one to the other. That is what we want to resist. We have already stated flatly that we have little problem with the scientific observation that the world has been warming up a bit and that anthropogenic CO2 probably has much to do with it. We’d agree that reducing carbon emissions is the ‘most obvious’ way to reduce likely impacts. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best, or the only. As for ‘very serious impacts’, our stance would be that science has very little to say on the matter. Because how climate effects turn into social effects relate more to political questions. Our political response should be informed by science, yes, but not flow from it – science doesn’t generate moral imperatives. There’s a multitude of possible political responses. It’s just a shame that we’re not in a position to choose between alternatives. We’d go as far as to say that policy changes might well be needed. But you provide little choice over the nature of that political response – no choice, in fact. Only statements about catastrophe. Our objection is that all these points get packaged into the same bundle that you have packaged them into by all the political parties of all political persuasions – not to mention science journalists – and that to criticise it is to be in denial of ‘the science’.

The most interesting part of his argument is surely his definition of climate change denial as “making perverse challenge to scientific evidence driven by political, economic or pathological motives”. Why should anyone engaged in an argument (any argument) feel it necessary to offer a definition of what it means to take an opposing position?

“Across the spectrum, there is a failure to sustain coherent political perspectives, and so the language of environmental crisis fills the void. Same with the pages of the Guardian.”

What does that even mean? That’s not nuance, it’s gobbledegook.

I could be wrong, but such obfuscation is usually a tell-tale sign of 100% proof climate change denial, by which I mean making perverse challenge to scientific evidence driven by political, economic or pathological motives. Please, make it simple for me. What part of the climate orthodoxy do you want to resist? That greenhouse gas emissions are driving up the temperature? That as emissions continue the temperature will continue to rise with uncertain, but probably very serious impacts for millions of people? That reducing carbon emissions is the most obvious way to reduce those likely impacts? That cutting carbon emissions will require change in policy?

David

Even if it were some kind of crypto-communism that is driving the environmental agenda, our point is that it expresses itself in environmental ‘scientific’ terminology, not on its own terms – as communism would, necessarily. As we point out, all political perspectives are increasingly being expressed in the language of ‘environment’. So if it’s a commie plot, it’s also a ‘Rightie’ plot. Across the spectrum, there is a failure to sustain coherent political perspectives, and so the language of environmental crisis fills the void. Same with the pages of the Guardian.

If you can’t follow a nuanced argument, it is no wonder that your articles are so full of contradiction and alarm. You propagate your confusion and disorientation because you conflate climate science and climate politics.

(As an aside – did you know that the watermelon metaphor was first used in Japanese militarist propaganda attacking Esperantists? Green is the colour of Esperanto…)

So it’s all a commie plot? Sheesh, even the hardliners in the US oil industry have moved on from that one.

Like I said, good luck.
David