No place in debate for climate contrarians

‘Woke’ media outlets are muzzling anyone who challenges conventional scientific wisdom.

Consensus enforcement is a potent new force in climate science where sceptical views increasingly are being silenced as a danger to public good.

Academic website The Conversation said this week it would ban comments from those it judged to be climate deniers and lock their accounts. The Conversation editor and executive director Misha Ketchell justified the ban on sceptical comments as a defence of “quiet Australians” who “understand and respect the science”.

The Conversation’s shift to a monologue reflects a deeper push that is raising alarm worldwide.

Contrarian scientist Jennifer Marohasy is among those listed on an international table of climate sceptics whose views should not be published. Marohasy says she is “proud to be listed as part of the resistance to what will one day be recognised as postmodern science”.

“I base my arguments and conclusions on evidence, and I apply logic. Of course, science is a method. Science is never ‘settled’,” she says. “Those who appeal primarily to the authority of science and the notion of a consensus are more interested in politics. Central to the scientific method is the hypothesis that can be tested: that can potentially be falsified. We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong.”

Also on the list published by University of California, Merced, were international climate scientists Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen and Richard Tol, as well as academics Bjorn Lomborg and Australia’s Ian Plimer and Maurice Newman.

The list was drawn from research published in the journal Nature, which juxtaposed 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across 200,000 research publications and 100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change.

In a statement accompanying the article, lead author Alex Petersen says: “It’s time to stop giving these people (contrarians) visibility, which can be easily spun into false authority.

“By tracking the digital traces of specific individuals in vast troves of publicly available media data, we developed methods to hold people and media outlets accountable for their roles in the climate change denialism movement, which has given rise to climate change misinformation at scale.”

Curry says the paper “does substantial harm to climate science … There are a spectrum of perspectives, especially at the knowledge frontiers. Trying to silence or delegitimise any of these voices is very bad for science.”

The Conversation’s ban is focused on reader feedback. But Marohasy says the online publication has long rejected her articles and comments.

“Despite my dozen or more publications in international climate science journals, editors at The Conversation have been intent for some years on excluding me,” Marohasy says. “I went to great lengths some years ago to get an article published in The Conversation based around a paper I had published in international climate science journal Atmospheric Research.”

Marohasy included charts to show the effect of how remodelling a temperature series through the process of homogenisation can significantly affect a temperature trend.

“The editor wouldn’t consider publishing my article, claiming it was nonsense,” she says. “Yet I was simply explaining what the Bureau of Meteorology actually do.” Marohasy says she has had a similar experience with comments. “Once I tried to get some comments into a thread. Everything seemed to be going well and then all my comments disappeared,” she says. “They deleted a whole afternoon of discussion I was having.”

Ketchell says he received an incredible response — “both supportive and hostile” — after he drew attention to the ban on sceptical comments. The disclosure came as The Conversation became part of a global media push by 250 outlets to raise awareness of climate change issues that was instigated by the Columbia Journalism Review. Ketchell tells Inquirer the ban was not part of the Covering Climate Now initiative.

According to the CCN website the media entities joined forces to foster urgency and action over the climate “crisis” and devote extra time to what CJR claimed was “the defining story of our time”. A briefing on the initiative rejected suggestions it was turning journalists into activists.

“This concern distorts what news-gathering is about,” CJR says. “Journalism has always been about righting wrongs, holding the powerful to account, calling out lies.”

Ketchell says handling the views of the small group hostile to climate science is a complex media-ethics question “and it’s one on which reasonable people can differ”.

In response to questions from Inquirer, Ketchell says everyone in Australia is entitled to free speech but not everyone is entitled to have their words published on The Conversation. “It is part of the role of a journalist to filter disinformation and curate a positive public discussion that is evidence-based and doesn’t distort the range of views by giving undue prominence to a noisy minority,” he says.

Ketchell says comments challenging the scientific basis of climate change will be regarded as off-topic unless the article is specifically about this subject.

“We moderate anything that is a deliberate misinformation and distortion of facts or attempts to misrepresent arguments or community members,” he says.

“We know climate sceptics are very good at derailing constructive conversations, so we’ll remove comments that attempt to hijack threads or to push an agenda or argument irrelevant to the discussion.”

Ketchell says commenters are encouraged to engage with the article they are commenting on and to back up their claims with credible research.

The website will be more careful to police the “small and vocal group of climate science contrarians whose passion overwhelms their ability to assess the evidence”, he says.

Opinion-based sceptics have ample opportunity to have their say on social media and in many media outlets.

“As long as they aren’t allowed to overwhelm the quiet Australians who understand and respect the science, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Ketchell says.