http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brendan_oneill/2006/11/a_climate_of_censorship.html
The Guardian
A climate of censorship
Brendan O'Neill
23 November 2006
In a speck to the Royal United Services Institute on November 9, foreign secretary Margaret Beckett called on the media to deny terrorists and their supporters a platform. While it might help to generate "tense exchanges" it also "artificially polarises debate".
That is a fairly typical Foreign Office line. But then she said something shocking. "I've seen [the same thing] in the long-running debate on climate change: wheel out the resident sceptic, however unrepresentative or discredited, to generate tension and voice provocative views in the name of editorial balance. It makes for more heated exchanges and louder headlines. But it is not the way to build a common consensus on the ground we share."
Here, Beckett explicitly compared "climate-change skeptics" to terrorists, and implied that both should be denied media air time. In one fell swoop, she demonised those who challenge the consensus on climate change by lumping them in with radicals who support the use of violence, and suggested these sceptics should be censored.
Whatever you might think of climate-change sceptics, the fact is that most of them are scientists, and many of them work in British universities. Yet here we had the secretary of state for foreign affairs putting these middle-class professionals in the same camp as terrorists who, according to the government, pose the greatest threat to life and liberty as we know it.
Beckett is following a trend. Increasingly, environmentalists are calling for the silencing of climate-change sceptics or deniers. The deniers' words are so dangerous, we are told, that they must be censored for the good of humanity. Some have even claimed that in denying climate change, these individuals are committing a "crime against humanity" and should be put on trial.
I am not a scientist or an expert on climate change. But I am free speech advocate. And this rising tide of intolerance and censoriousness in the debate about climate change should concern anyone who believes in free and open and rational debate.
Over the past year, climate-change sceptics have been steadily demonised as a public enemy, even a threat to security and prosperity. This is clear from the tag "climate-change denier", which is used to describe a mixed bag of people - from those who think the planet is getting hotter but argue that we will be able to deal with it, to those who deny outright that any warming is taking place (who are in a tiny minority). The term "denier" is powerfully pejorative. As Charles Jones, an emeritus Professor of English at Edinburgh University, has argued, the denier label is intended to assign any "doubters" with "the same moral repugnance one associates with Holocaust denial". In short, they are wicked people with base motives.
Some even claim that climate-change sceptics are complicit in a coming Holocaust, and may therefore face Nuremberg-style trials in the future. Green columnist Mark Lynas writes: "I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial - except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don't will one day have to answer for their crimes."
It is usually only in authoritarian states that thoughts or words are equated with crimes, where dictators talk about "thought crimes" and their threat to the fabric of society. Yet, in contemporary, cosmopolitan Britain, the arguments of small numbers of sceptical scientists are now looked upon as criminal acts that will cause death and destruction unless they are kept in check. It seems that, if anything, climate-change deniers are worse than Holocaust deniers: where crackpots like David Irving merely deny an event that has already occurred, these scary scientists are lambasted for denying an event that has yet to occur and which we might be able to stop. It's a short step from demonising a group of people, and describing their arguments as toxic and dangerous, to demanding more and harsher censorship.
Indeed, in America, one producer for the respected current affairs show, 60 minutes, justified his ban on climate-change sceptics by comparing them to Holocaust deniers. When asked why his various feature programmes on global warming did not include the views of global-warming sceptics, he replied: "If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?" He argued that airing the views of climate change sceptics is deeply problematic: "There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible."
More recently, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said broadcasters should think twice before allowing climate-change sceptics on air, because "allowing such misinformation to spread would cause harm". Again, the words of sceptics or doubters are depicted as a kind of poisonous force that is literally bad for us, and which must therefore be quarantined.
Some will argue that this is simply about right and wrong information, and that the climate-change activists are right and the climate-change sceptics are wrong. In truth, some environmentalist campaigners are seeking to silence debate and create a new uncritical, unquestioning climate. In its report Warm Words: How Are we telling the story of climate change and can we tell it better?, published earlier this year, the IPPR argued that "the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new 'common sense' ... [We] need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techqnies of engagement....The 'facts' need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken."
Shrewdness? Nurturing a new common sense? Changing mass behaviour? Facts so taken for granted that they never should be spoken, much less backed up? This shows that something more pernicious is going on here than simply trying to set the record straight. As in all attempts at censorship, from Torquemeda to New Labour's religious hatred legislation, this is about controlling how people think and what people say. And it is an attempt to win the argument without having to have the argument; to win it with the blunt instruments of demonisation rather through than free and open discussion.
For some climate-change activists, the facts about manmade climate change are simply too pure and correct to submit for public interrogation and debate. First, this overlooks the fact that there is still a live debate, whether you like it or not, over how much hotter the planet will get and what kind of measures will be required to deal with it. And there is a desperate need for a political debate about people's needs and aspirations for a better life, and how they can continue to be met as the climate changes. Second, it overlooks the fact that it is through public debate and public debate only that the truth of a proposition can be established.
As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, which was published in 1859 and remains essential reading for anyone who believes in free speech: "Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action. On no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right."
Mill would have had little truck with the notion that manmade climate change is such an established fact that it should be above rigorous debate. Describing his age as one also "terrified at skepticism", he wrote: "The claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs so useful, not to say indispensable to wellbeing, that it is [the] duty of governments to uphold those beliefs ... It is often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what such men would wish to practise."
There could be no better description of the efforts to sideline climate-change sceptics. Environmentalists seek to protect their opinions from public debate by claiming that they are "indispensable to wellbeing", and they describe as "bad men" those who would dare to challenge their opinions. And they see nothing wrong in "prohibiting what such men would wish to practice".
You can call that a simple attempt to transmit facts, if you like. But I'm with Mill: it is censorship, and no good has ever come of censorship.