"Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets" -–Napoleon Bonaparte
The U.K.’s 2013 energy bill is up for a key vote Tuesday, and even the best-case outcome is likely to hurt an already weak British economy. Three years into David Cameron’s five-year term as Prime Minister, growth is at a standstill, government deficits remain stubbornly high, and Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives are on track for a stinging defeat at the polls. Yet Mr. Cameron and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners seem intent on pursuing the economic folly of total “decarbonization” of the British economy. Voters could be forgiven if they haven’t noticed how crazy this policy is. --Editorial,
The Wall Street Journal, 4 June 2013
U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Davey will make his strongest attack yet on climate change skeptics he accuses of purveying a what he calls a “seductive” and “dangerous” message that global warming has stopped. His comments come as the debate over climate change and its causes intensifies. Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, a Conservative who started the Global Warming Policy Foundation that shares concerns about the costs of policies to address climate change, wrote in a Feb. 25 letter on its website that he aimed to draw attention to a warming trend that “appears to have ceased.” Davey will say the pause in surface temperature is a “false summit” and that temperatures are increasing caused by greenhouse gas emissions trapped in the atmosphere. --Sally Bakewell,
Bloomberg, 3 June 2013
If Mr Davey is so confident in his facts, he should surely be confident of their triumphing in a free and open debate. But what he misses is that too many of those who accept the scientific evidence, and want to do the right thing by the planet, the Energy Secretary and his allies often sound just as “blinkered” – even swivel-eyed – as those they castigate. Mr Davey’s new Energy Bill is part of an effort to “progressively decarbonise” our energy sector and economy. That appears to mean sky-high bills, vast subsidies for wind farms and potentially fatal energy costs for manufacturers. Is it any wonder that he is having difficulty in convincing the public of its wisdom? --Editorial,
The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2013
Post-Leveson, politicians increasingly think they have the right to tell the Press what it can print. Yesterday it was the turn of Lib Dem Minister Ed Davey, who said it was wrong for the Press to give a ‘platform’ to anybody daring to question the political orthodoxy on climate change. The fact is the influence of the printed Press is tiny compared to the power of the BBC, which, in its global warming crusade, has dropped any claim to objectivity. But then we know what this is about: it’s a cynical exercise in softening up voters not to complain when swingeing green taxes are added to their energy bills. --Editorial,
Daily Mail, 4 June 2013
Germany’s Science Press Association (Wissenschafts-Pressekonferenz e.V. – WPK) considers it unacceptable that individual journalists are publicly paraded by the German Environment Agency and presented as incompetent just because they criticise leading climate scientists. In its latest brochure on climate change (“And yet, it warms”), the Agency published the names of journalists whose positions “are not consistent with the state of knowledge of climate science.” “It is not the task of a government agency to determine which opinions may be expressed and which are not,” said WPK CEO Martin Schneider. “Journalists may and must voice different positions, and they may and must question well-established scientists again and again.” Moreover, it cannot be the task of a public institution to quasi officially declare certain scientific positions as true. --
Wissenschaftjournalisten, 3 June 2013
Later today, Ed Davey is due to launch an extraordinary attack on climate change sceptics and "some sections of the press" for publishing their views. It's completely inappropriate for a senior politician to criticise the editorial policy of any newspaper, however much he or she disagrees with it. Even if we put the moral objections to state censorship to one side, there's a good practical reason for not muzzling your intellectual opponents. As JS Mill points out in On Liberty, either they are right, in which case you shouldn't try and suppress the truth, or they are wrong, in which case you have nothing to fear from the publication of their views since their wrong-headedness will then be plain for everyone to see. If Ed Davey really believes that the truth is on his side in this debate, he should encourage his opponents to air their views in public as often as possible, not criticise "some sections of the press" for giving them a platform. --Toby Young,
The Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2013
This evening on my LBC show we discussed Ed Davey’s outrageous idea that newspapers and broadcasters should refrain from giving a platform to climate change sceptics. How very ‘liberal’ of him. I remember at 18 Doughty Street back in 2007 I phoned Greenpeace to invite them to take part in a panel discussion on climate change. They refused on the basis that the argument was won and there was nothing to debate. It’s attitudes like this that make me very suspicious of this climate change industry, which is supported by people whose fanaticism borders on the religious. --
Iain Dale, 3 June 2013
Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance. --
Leon Wieseltier, 19 May 2013
