Climate Change: the Ad Hominem Strategy

Don’t like skeptics of anthropogenic climate change?  Call them names and accuse them of being bought. That’s a tack borrowed from the left. But the spirit of free-speech and reasoned debate suffers. Here’s a facet of Jeff Jacoby’s gem in the Boston Globe (re: the latest Newsweek cover):

Why is the tone of Sharon Begley’s cover story — nine pages in which anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries — so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as "deniers," or agents of the "denial machine," or deceptive practitioners of "denialism?" Wouldn’t it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

And here on the apostates of the Big Green Church:

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy — as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

Read it all.