By Climate Resistance

On The Nation blog, David Roberts of Gristmill (another blog) writes:  Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a ‘70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That’s because—news flash!—climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference.

Let us put him straight. Climate scepticism (or skepticism) is not an ideological position. Climate scepticism is not an ideology. Climate scepticism does not offer a perspective on the world from which follow moral imperatives, and climate scepticism is not a doctrine, around which climate sceptics wish to organise society. There is no “world view” of climate scepticism. Environmentalism,on the other hand, is an ideology. It does create moral imperatives. It does wish to organise society around its principles. It is a world view. Of course, climate orthodoxy and environmentalism can be challenged from political or ideological perspectives. But there is no consistent “climate sceptic” position. There doesn’t need to be; It’s not an argument for a course of action, and its objections to environmentalism are varied. There have been criticisms of climate politics from the left, and from the centre (or center), and from the right. But these perspectives are not unique to climate scepticism.

To make his point, Roberts links back to a March ‘07 post of his on Gristmill, where he makes the claim that, the scientific contest, at least as it relates to the basic facts of global warming, is over. If the science is settled, he reasons, then the idea that “The contest between climate advocates and their critics is primarily a scientific contest, a debate over who has the best science” is false. By elimination, the argument with no science must be political. Of course, both of Roberts’s premises are false. The scientific debate is not over - it’s never over, and can never be over. That is itself an unscientific statement. Read more here.