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Silencing dissent

By Graham Young - posted Friday, 4 July 2008


Clive Hamilton's dissing of On Line Opinion ("The sad demise of 'On Line Opinion'" On Line Opinion July 2, 2008) is replete with irony piled upon irony in its brief, and almost content free, 849 words.

Consider this. If On Line Opinion is in fact in its death throes, why is Clive taking the time to write to its editors, publish an article in it at their invitation, and then issue not so veiled threats to target its funding base?

"… I wonder whether the esteemed institutions affiliated with On-Line Opinion want to be associated with climate rat-baggery …"

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All this from a man who has forfeited any right to take part in this debate. As he says in New Matilda "when I first joined the climate change debate, I decided there was no way I could pretend to have a comprehensive grasp of climate science … I had to decide not what to believe but whom to believe."

How do you decide who to believe if you have abdicated your right to analyse the arguments?

And if he does not understand the science, he cannot be part of the argument. He must leave it to those with the intellectual grunt and application to undertake that task.

On Line Opinion is an enlightenment project. We believe that there is such a thing as the truth, and that it is out there, even if none of us will ever perceive it more than dimly.

We are also an egalitarian project. When I set-up OLO I saw a need for a site where Australians of whatever political persuasion - no matter their background, their training, their age, their gender, their race - could engage on important issues. It was to be a site which would open up a place for new voices, which would seek out people with special expertise to share their knowledge.

One that partook of the larrikin Australian character, being no respecter of reputations and hierarchies for their own sake.

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No contributor has special privileges on OLO. We don't do editorials, and when I contribute to debate, apart from rare appearances as forum moderator, it is on the same basis as everyone else.

On Line Opinion is also a place for political connections. We welcome lobbyists as well as academics, politicians, activists and citizens. We want to put citizens in touch with decision makers and those with influence, and we don't differentiate between them because they might have a particular point of view, or draw their paycheck from a particular source.

Our fundamental tenet is that while there is such a thing as the truth it demands constant mining and refining for it to be discerned, and that it is not our place to tell others what to think. Consenting adults can come to this site and see opposing arguments laid out before them and make-up their own minds. Clive is under-estimating the ability of our average reader.

I'm an empiricist. Looking at the facts and theories, and seeing how predictive or not they were, has led me to hold the political beliefs that I hold. When the facts show me to be wrong, I change my mind.

So here we have another irony. While Clive has been keen to publish on OLO in the past, he has a hierarchical, authority-bound approach to argument which is quite at odds with our ethos. Because he deals in reputations, facts have no power over him, to change his mind or otherwise.

Another irony is that when I first looked for support in the early days of On Line Opinion I went to talk to Clive. I also approached the other two prominent think tanks at the time, the CIS and the IPA. The conversation with The Australia Institute proceeded over quite some time, but ultimately they declined to become institutionally involved. I was told that was because they could not support a site that represented the range of views that we did.

Other organisations do not have the same exclusivist claims to the truth, and you can see a list of them on our drop-down list of member institutions. These organisations contribute to the site on the understanding that views directly opposed to theirs will be published. That's what an open society is all about.

I have followed the Greenhouse issue as long as I can remember, certainly since the 60s. I have never had a problem with the proposition that increasing emissions of CO2 increase the earth's temperature. But I do have a problem with people trying to shut-down debate as to what sort of a problem this is, and what to do about it.

On Line Opinion first bought into the AGW debate in a significant way after I saw an IPCC press release criticising David Henderson and Ian Castles for suggesting that the IPCC emissions scenarios should calculate the size of different economies using purchasing power parity rather than market exchange rates. The IPCC denigrated these eminent men as "so-called experts".

It was obvious to me from my own knowledge of the concepts that Henderson, a distinguished economics professor, and Castles, a former head of the ABS, were correct and that a response like this meant that the IPCC knew they were and were trying to hide the fact. I solicited an article and we published it. For a while it was heavily cited as the only place you could read an accessible version of the Henderson-Castles critique. Was this an act of Greenhouse "denialism"? I have no idea what exactly this crude term means, but maybe Clive would say it was. The problem for him is that the Henderson-Castles critique is now pretty widely accepted, despite the IPCC's criticism at the time.

That's the first time we published scepticism that has since become accepted wisdom, but not the last. For example, here is an article on the notorious "hockey stick". I suspect that this essay by Jennifer Marohasy, reporting on Roy Spencer's work on the Aqua satellite results will be another.

Which leads to another irony. Clive has left his role as a spruiker and now fills a professional niche in a university. Not any niche, but one associated with ethics. Yet Clive hasn't made the leap. He doesn't appear to understand that what is acceptable from a lobbyist is not acceptable from an academic, particularly one who has set himself up to tell others what is right and wrong.

An ethical approach to argument avoids ad hominem attacks and concentrates on facts and arguments. It treats its opponent's arguments with respect, and doesn't misrepresent them, and it researches its own arguments thoroughly and presents them honestly.

Clive fails on all counts. His article is full of ad hominem diatribes. To take but one, the term "denialist" is a neologism, which derives from holocaust denial and seeks to insinuate that people who question Clive's orthodoxy are moral villains.

He also refers to me as an "emotional fanatic" without any shred of evidence.

Because he eschews facts and deals in reputation, Clive has almost confined himself to the ad hominem. How else can he argue?

It also leads to him completely ignoring the substance of the article that we published, and he objected to, called "The UN climate change numbers hoax". The title might be a little over-stated (that's headlines for you), but the conclusions in the article are unsurprising. Anyone who has paid attention to the IPCC reports knows that the review process has its critics and that a number of the reviewers have complained about their comments being ignored. The advance in this article is that via FOI requests the process in one instance was completely laid bare.

As in the Henderson-Castles case the ethical thing to do is to fix the system, not shoot the messenger.

Clive then misrepresents people who are sceptical of aspects of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), likening them to people who say the earth is flat, or who deny a link between AIDS and HIV, or who see a world Jewish conspiracy, which is patently absurd.

He trots out untruths, such as the line that there are no peer-reviewed papers published by "denialists". Apart from the problematic nature of much of what passes for peer review, as highlighted by the Wegman Committee, high profile sceptics such as McIntyre and McKitrick, Roy Spencer, Hans Svensmark, and Roger Pielke sr, to name but a few, regularly publish in peer reviewed journals. He can apparently discover that one of our authors is, like he was, a lobbyist, but he can't turn-up a few peer reviewed journals.

Of course, a lot of Clive's argument isn't unethical, simply opportunistic or just plain muddled. For example, he claims that if we publish something we endorse it. "… [E]ach time On Line Opinion runs one of their pieces it is, inter alia, endorsing their view that Australia's most eminent climate scientists are frauds and liars." So, by publishing his article we are doing what? Endorsing his view that we are in decline?

Clive has a lot of problems with the concept of balance. He appears to think that because according to his view of the world, the overwhelming bulk of scientists disagree with the "denialists" then we should only print majority-approved science. Apart from the fact that science doesn't work by majority consensus, that is not the way that argument works either. Thesis and anti-thesis is what we are about, and it is hard to do that any other way than 50:50.

We do have an editorial stance on what is publishable, and the test is that it must be arguable, not that it must necessarily be true. The Greenhouse material that we have published fits that category, on both sides of the fence. Clive asks whether I would publish "Larouche delusions about the Royal Family being in cahoots with global Jewry to run drugs". I do get this sort of material sent to me by the Citizens Electoral Council, but my spam filter copes with it very well. It is not within our ambit.

Clive also misunderstands the role that newsworthiness takes in the editorial process. There is no news in just reporting the status quo. When the latest IPCC report was released, consensus views were more newsworthy, because there was new information. Since the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and the Stern Review most of the developments have been on the sceptical side of the argument. Clive's exploited the news cycle before in the past to get his own minority views up as The Australia Institute strove to change the status quo. he shouldn't be surprised when others do the same, or when honest publishers like us publish them.

It's a pity that Clive is going. He's capable of getting arguments right even if he's made a hash of them in this case, and certainly his positions have a place on OLO, even though I rarely agree with them. In this case he's given me an opportunity to state just what On Line Opinion is about, which is something I don't get to do often enough. He's also demonstrated how neglected, even in universities, the traditional arts of analysis and argument are.

The idea that truth is relative has taken over some areas of the humanities through postmodernism, theory and forms of Marxist analysis. That's the school that Clive's argument on global warming comes from. Reading his article, and the comments on the article thread, they really don't cut it in the outside world. We instinctively know that things do have objective reality and are not power constructs. That it doesn't matter how many people say it is true if it isn't. It's in that place in the intellectual debate that On Line Opinion fits. We're not in demise or denial. We're just starting to come into our own.

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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