As I have made clear in many posts on global warming, I think it is true that the earth is in a warming period and that human activity is at the very least accelerating that trend. But because I question some of parts of the political consensus that has attached itself to the science (such as the wisdom of the Kyoto Protocol), I have been treated as if I were an all-out global warming denier.
I was therefore impressed by this article in Spiked, by Frank Furedi. Furedi points out the the word "denial," is the modern equivalent of heresy. A denier is someone who dissents from some article of the truth faith.
[I]n the early years of the twenty-first century, Western societies have become prey to powerful illiberal, intolerant and anti-democratic influences. Those who question prevailing cultural orthodoxies are often treated as immoral, evil people and their arguments depicted as a form of secular heresy.
Many influential figures have a cavalier attitude to free speech, believing that ‘dangerous’ ideas should be repressed. Disbelief in today’s received wisdom is described as ‘Denial’, which is branded by some as a crime that must be punished. It began with Holocaust denial, before moving on to the denial of other genocides. Then came the condemnation of ‘AIDS denial’, followed by accusations of ‘climate change denial’.
Furedi is particularly good on the way global warming dissenters are treated.
Once denial has been stigmatised, there are demands for it to be censored. Consider the current attempts to stifle anyone who questions predictions of catastrophic climate change. Such sceptics are frequently branded ‘global warming deniers’, and their behaviour compared to that of anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers. Some advocate a policy of zero tolerance towards the climate change deniers. ‘I have very limited patience with those who deny human responsibility for upper-atmosphere pollution and ozone depletion’, says one moral crusader, before declaring: ‘There is no intellectual difference between the Lomborgians [those who adhere to the arguments of the sceptic Bjorn Lomborg] who steadfastly refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming from scientists of unquestioned reputation, and the neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers’ (8). The heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned.
Furedi shows how modern orthodoxies begin not from some transcendent standard of the good, but from some unambiguous evil. The Holocaust is almost always first choice. Then anything they wish to condemn becomes "another Holocaust." And just as Holocaust denial has been made a crime in many European countries, why not global warming denial.
One Australian journalist wrote last year that, as ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, perhaps ‘there is a case for making climate change denial an offence’. Why? Because it is a ‘crime against humanity, after all’ (13). David Roberts, a journalist for the online magazine Grist, would like to see global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals. In a vitriolic tone characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors he argued: ‘We should have war crimes trials for these bastards…some sort of climate Nuremberg.’ (14)
Here are the references:
(8) See David Pollard, Global Warming And The Crime Of Denial, 7 March 2004
(13) Margo Kingston, ‘Himalayan lakes disaster’, DailyBriefing, 21 November 2005.
(14) David Roberts The Denial Industry, Gristmill, 19 September, 2006,
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