Geoscientist Online

Dear Editor, With the greatest of respect, I am afraid Dr Ridd has fallen foul of at least two talking points that former BBC journalist James Painter has proven to be predominantly a feature of right-of-centre media in English speaking countries (see http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/poles-apart). The two most obvious fallacies implied in Dr Ridd’s remarks are: (1) The marketplace of ideas and; (2) Climate Change ‘sceptics’ are like Galileo. With regard to (1) not all opinions are equally valid; and there is no rational reason to doubt the validity of a genuine consensus of expert opinion supported by a wealth of theoretical prediction that has now been validated my numerous independent lines of observational data. With regard to (2) Galileo (and those that came after him) used the genuine scepticism that is the basis of modern science to overturn an archaic and unscientific explanation for the nature of the Universe that was increasingly in conflict with accumulating observational evidence.

As suggested by James Painter, therefore, the significance of the journalistic distribution of supposed climate change ‘scepticism’ is this: It proves that it is not genuine scepticism at all. On the contrary, it is wilful ideological blindness akin to the dismissal by young earth creationists of any evidence that the Earth is very old on the basis that all such evidence must be wrong because it is not consistent with their antecedent beliefs.

Martin Lack