Voices of climate dissent 'being gagged'

Climate-change critics complain they have been kept out of the international debate by mainstream scientists who dismiss them as oil industry lobbyists or lunatics.

Bjoern Lomborg, one of the world’s leading climate-change sceptics, who has been compared to Hitler by his enemies, said: “I really think it reflects entirely on them.”

Mr Lomborg is a Danish statistician who says global warming is not a big threat and international treaties requiring sharp and immediate cuts in carbon emissions would cost a lot but do little good.

Angry words and table-pounding, he said, only show “that your argument is not that strong”.

Climate-change experts counter that his and similar views are no longer relevant because the evidence now is overwhelming that man-made warming will have dangerous consequences if left unchecked.

“Their claim that debate is being stifled has the same credibility as members of the Flat Earth Society complaining about the round Earth mafia,” said NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt.

Mr Lomborg accepts that the Earth is warming because of man, but says a changing climate, including the threat posed by rising sea levels to small island nations, is a less urgent problem than, for example, Aids or malnutrition.

It is a view that has infuriated advocates of immediate action by the world’s governments.

“What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s? You cannot treat people like cattle,” Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was quoted as saying three years ago.

“There is never a reason for name-calling, and any time someone plays the Hitler card, it’s usually an obvious sign of desperation in the debate,” said Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center.

That the planet is getting warmer is well-documented by scientific data, so sceptics now mainly challenge the majority view on the scope of the problem.

“Whether or not it’s happening is not the point. It’s obviously happening,” said Pat Michaels, a senior fellow of environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

“How much will it be … and what should you do about it? That’s where the debate should be. But that debate is being driven by very shrill rhetoric.”

Meteorology professor Richard Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said proponents of the predominant view on global warming started trying to stamp out dissent long ago.

“The harassment 15 years ago and earlier pretty much succeeded. Those entering the field thereafter knew the ground rules,” he said.

While Mr Lindzen is a scientist, Mr Lomborg angers his opponents partly because he looks at global warming from an economist’s perspective. He’s not a climate scientist nor does he claim to be.

Critics say he misleads non-scientific audiences about the dangers of a warmer world with crude cost-benefit analyses, like his contention that if warming means more people will die from heat waves, then it must also mean fewer will be dying from cold.

“I hold him responsible for possibly delaying the debate on climate change by two-three years,” said Jacqueline McGlade, the head of the European Environment Agency, a European Union body.

Mr Lomborg says his arguments are gaining ground, if not in the public debate, then among policy makers.

“It’s true my opponents seem to have won the battle of words, but it seems to me I’ve won the battle of the reality,” he said, "because nations are actually doing very little about climate change.”