"freedom of speech" versus "the quest for the truth"

I thought we discovered that if we started out with "truth" our lives would end in doubt whereas if we started out with doubt we might discover some certainity.

The relationship between global temps and carbon dioxide levels has been inferred for 150 years and clearly identified in the last thirty by analysis of ice cores. We know the earth is a dynamic system and not all answers are in but prudent risk management would imply that we should try to put some upper limit on the scale of our global pyromania.

The "Enemies of the people" are not the climatologists they are those that don't want facts to cloud their bottom line.

Do I beleive those that applaud climate change denial are "Betraying the Planet",hmm difficult. The planet is on its last legs, having survived a few billion years of dim sunlight by running warm it now swims in light 30% brighter than those early days by running cool. The sun actually gets much hotter from here on so maybe the biosphere has only a few hundred million years left in it before UV starts breaking up water in the upper atmosphere. The planets in good shape but as its running out of biosphere reboots, if the mad monkeys mess it up, a second shot at intelligent primates capable of a technological civilisation is by no means certain.

I do therefore believe the denialists are calling for our premature and abrupt ejection from the wonderfull Eden of the "holocene sweet spot". But most of all I beleive that if we don't trust our greatest pointer to truth, the scientific method, we betray our whole civilisation. The debate was sullied by twenty years of misinformation, astro turfing, denial and political hardball by the owners of an energy system with an net impact on the natural planetary processes of temperature management. When we are dealing with an energy system that drives geopolitics and where control of the commanding heights of the economy are at stake the "enemy of the people" isn't likely to be a few hundred climate scientists preaching caution, its much more likely to be those with money and power who say push on, don't worry.....

I am disgusted by the arguments, methods and hubris of the denialists and those who would comprimise with them. I am therefore "an enemy of the people" in Ibsen's sense.

As for me, more than money, or fame, or anything else, I have always prized the truth.

And the truth is Krugman is right.



Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.