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Thursday, February 15, 2007

Compelling Consensus?

In a recent blogpost, my IEET colleague George Dvorsky takes journalist Ellen Goodman to task for what he calls her "recent outburst" in which she states: “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

Dvorsky takes this as a cue to remind us that "[l]ate last year 'revisionist' historian David Irving was released from an Austrian prison after serving 13 months of a 3-year sentence. Irving, a notorious Holocaust denier and anti-semite, had violated Austria’s ’Prohibition Statute‘ which forbids the trivialization of the Nazi Holocaust." Obviously Dvorsky has no sympathy at all with Irving's views just as he likely has strong sympathies with Goodman's here. He writes, "I am certainly no fan of Irving and his warped view of history, but I find it disquieting to know that one can still be jailed in a liberal democracy like Austria for being a prisoner of conscience."

I'm with Dvorsky on the Irving case, as it happens. Precisely because the Holocaust occurred and could too easily be repeated and hence must be well remembered and better understood, it is crucial that those few who would deny or cynically pretend to deny its atrocity must be free to express their erroneous views and then feel the devastating spotlight of public scrutiny, falsification, and condemnation.

Ugly falsehoods thrive better in secrecy than in the light, dangerous developments are rendered less harmful when they are impelled into the open. Needless to say, however, understanding all this is quite another thing from pretending such views are legitimate or contribute to inquiry or deserve celebration in some perverse sense.

The fact is that Goodman doesn't suggest anywhere in her "outburst" (so-called) that climate change denial should land its advocates in jail. Instead, she expresses what looks to me (and, if I'm reading him aright, Dvorsky, too) like very reasonable frustration that corporate media keeps whomping up a false spectacle of "controversy" where science has arrived in fact at consensus on matters of urgent concern to everyone alive on earth.

Why, then, does Dvorsky describe this reasonable frustration as an "outburst" in the first place? I confess that I remain perplexed even after repeated readings of both Goodman's article and Dvorsky's response to it.

Perhaps a better historical analogy for climate-change denial that Goodman could have drawn in her piece would have been to the well-known misleading corporate-sponsored "science" that long supported the profitable but personally catastrophic fantasy of the "safe cigarette" -- rather than to Holocaust denial. But even as it is, Goodman's article doesn't put anything like the normative weight on this analogy one would expect from reading Dvorsky's account of it, and definitely she doesn't propose anything like the intolerance he seems to be worrying about from her argument.

Goodman's "outburst" ends with some perfectly legitmate exasperation: "Can we change from debating global warming to preparing? Can we define the issue in ways that turn denial into action? In America what matters now isn't environmental science, but political science." One searches in vain for the call to jail or censor "climate skeptics."

Is it censorship or intolerance to point out that there are few reputable voices defending the flat-earth hypothesis or phlogiston at this point? Isn't that her point? To analogize climate change denial to Holocaust denial is just to highlight how outrageous it is -- not to defend censorship of those who express the denial.

Dvorsky suggests near the end of his argument that not every form dissent deserves to be celebrated as a contribution to free inquiry (even though we would both -- as most certainly so too would Goodman -- champion the right of the dissenter to free expression whatever the consequences), when he says, "It is another thing altogether for unscrupulous groups to like Exxon and corrupt politicians to add unwarranted noise and obstacles to the discussion." Since this is precisely the state of affairs Goodman is decrying I don't quite understand what it is about her piece that upset him so.

When Dvorsky goes on to say, "The war against climate change is at risk of becoming a new religion" I must admit that this seems a truly curious claim to me, inasmuch as what the overabundant consensus of climate scientists are saying here is that the facts are on their side and that the problems we confront are grave enough to deserve more attention by far than they are getting. The exhibition of "faith" here seems to attach far more conspicuously to the unfathomably widespread inaction and inattention of the leaders and citizens of industrial societies in the face of an overwhelming scientific consensus.

As a aside to my friend Jamais Cascio (also a colleague at IEET), who frets in a comment on Dvorsky's article that Goodman has run afoul of Godwin's Law, I must say it has long seemed to me that Godwin's Law needs a correlate Meta Godwin's Law to remind us not to apply the Law itself too promiscuously. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the Bush era may indeed demand a -- let us hope, temporary -- moratorium on citation of the Law where this Administration is concerned!

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