A failed suppression continues

Speaking of climate change, I am not the first to note this, but there continues to be a hell of lot of articles in the Australian press lately by warming skeptics complaining that their dissent is being suppressed.

It's starting to remind me of lefties complaining of suppression of dissent under the Howard government's sedition laws. It all has a bit of a Monty Python air about it, claiming suppression when everyone with ears in fact can hear what they are saying.

If their complaint is that they can't get published in peer reviewed journals, a large number of the vocal skeptics simply don't work directly in the field of climate research anyway. (Geologists are unduly represented, and while part of their knowledge is relevant to the big picture, I still wouldn't expect that they would be particularly knowledgable about studying what is happening in the atmosphere and oceans right now.)

The people at Real Climate have noticed this upswing in skeptic confidence too, and refer people to their Wiki as a resourse for information addressing the skeptic's arguments.

While my argument is that it is not even necessary to have a position on warming in order to believe that strong action on CO2 is warranted (due to ocean acidification,) I must say that I increasingly find the warming skeptics position irritating, in that they just ignore the reasonably put rebuttals by the climate scientists. (Real Climate has nearly always taken a moderate tone, in my opinion, although this latest post indicates that they are really just getting tired of being nice to skeptics.)

I'll give the skeptics the point that media reporting greatly favours any "alarmist" news, but this is not really something that affects the actual science. I am even happy enough to see a wildly inaccurate claim by Tim Flannery, for example, to be held up for ridicule by Tim Blair, but people shouldn't forget that he is just like the geologist skeptics in that there was never any reason to take his opinion particularly seriously anyway.

It is also true, as John Quiggin has noted, that being a conservative blogger who wants to see action on greenhouse gases is a very lonely position in Australia. It is actually very annoying to agree with Andrew Bolt's reading of federal politics about 90% per cent of the time, but then to find that he just runs with any skeptical argument on greenhouse gases and shows no sign of independently looking at the counterarguments.

It increasingly seems to me that many skeptics are now taking just as "religious" view of the issue as the Greens, with(for example), their belief that there is a vast quasi-conspiracy of climate scientists keeping quiet about the "truth" in order to keep their funding going.

Unfortunately though, it is the skeptic faith that seems likely to the one which is going to cause real problems for future generations.