Climate Believers and Abolitionists

The New Scientist's Environment Blog linked today to a paper comparing the rhetoric of climate and slavery. The paper's claims are that climate skeptics occupy the same moral and intellectual space today that defenders of slavery did in the 1800s. The superficiality of the argument is barely worth mention, but the lack of self-consciousness is. As I've mentioned before, the language of 'climate-denier' is a much more suggestive and potent rhetoric than the weak attempt to win the argument against skeptics by association. If anything, the attempt to link climate skeptics to every moral hot-button moral atrocity, from slavery to the Holocaust, reveals just how (non)-science based the arguments about climate change have become. Scientific argument narrowly is about natural science, but more broadly is about the appeal to reason and human intelligence. While there is of course a place for stirring moral appeals in rational public debate, what the climate/slavery paper is an example of is something altogether different. Frustrated at their failure to convince a wider swath of humanity of their views than they would like, environmentalists have decided to engage in the rhetorical equivalent of bullying. The climate issue becomes one not just of right and wrong, but us and them, savior and killer. This makes even somewhat less heated discussions of political morality, let alone calm consideration of social and natural science, next to impossible. Any departure from the orthodoxy is associated with slave-ownership and nazism, rather than with the actual problems of climate change.