David Rose is a journalist who sometimes writes about the grey areas within the climate change debate. As a result, he has already endured calls for his own children to murder him, been compared to Hitler despite being Jewish, and had his personal contact details published on Twitter.
But not content with those attacks, his detractors have now taken to Twitter to mock him for mentioning the slurs in a recent article. (h/t Bishop Hill blog)
This week, Rose penned an article for the Mail on Sunday essentially arguing for a balanced, reasoned debate on the true nature of climate change and the human response to it. Rose describes himself as a “lukewarmer” – someone who believes that global warming is taking place and is at least in part due to human activity, but who disagrees with the scale, and the responses. But, he says, reasoned debate cannot take place whilst there is so much hatred bandied about by ‘warmists’ – those who believe in man made climate change.
“There is one way the world really is getting hotter, very fast: in the temperature of the climate debate,” Rose writes. “The reason is simple: in November, there will be yet another vast UN conference, which will try, and fail, to get another legally binding treaty. The search will be futile, because however fierce the green pressure, India, China, Russia and, thanks to the Republican Congress, America, will not sign up to it.
“Maybe after that, when the hatred has dissipated a little, the debate we should have started years ago can begin. Because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter how hot we think the world might be in 2100: right now, the things greens and politicians are trying to do, cannot and will not work.”
As evidence of the hatred that Rose says pervades the debate, he cites his own experiences: “The remark about my children killing me was made some months ago, after The Guardian published one of several critiques of my work by its climate activist blogger, Dana Nuccitelli. One of the online commenters posted: ‘In a few years, self-defence is going to be made a valid defence for parricide [killing one’s own father], so Rose’s children will have this article to present in their defence at the trial.’
“Another commenter compared me to Adolf Hitler. Frankly, I didn’t take either of them too seriously. But last week on Twitter, someone else wrote that he knew where I lived, and posted my personal phone numbers.”
He also references recent comments made by a Greenpeace activist calling for Matt Ridley and other climate change ‘deniers’ to be “beheaded” (reported by Breitbart London): “Ridley complained, but the statements stayed on the website for at least four days. Comments in support of Ridley were removed by the site’s moderators, because they did not ‘abide by our community standards’. In an email to The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, Ridley pointed out that a Japanese hostage had just been beheaded by Islamic State.
“Language only barely less extreme is now common. In the US, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that anyone who denies global warming must be ‘punished in the afterlife… this kind of denial is an almost inconceivable sin’.”
His article was written as a belated response to one authored by Nick Cohen, published in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free. In it, Cohen wrote: “can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can’t call us “global warming deniers ” because “denier” makes us sound like “Holocaust deniers”, and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.”
However, almost as if to prove Rose’s point, the warmists, far from meeting Rose half way for a reasoned debate, have resorted to mocking him. Lord Deben took to Twitter to write: Now that lukewarmers have been outed by facts they are playing the ‘victim’ card. It’s not the world that’s against them it’s the science.
Whilst Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, mocked “Hilarious self-pitying nonsense as @DavidRoseUK interviews himself for ‘The Mail on Sunday’. Seriously.”
Australian climate journalist Joanne Nova, commenting on her blog, said “Welcome to western civilization’s advanced scientific debate. There are no shades of gray, we can’t discuss whether climate sensitivity is 1, 2,or 3 degrees, and it’s not even about numbers. It’s about whether you are good or evil.
“For a religious believer, the worst thing that could happen is a polite conversation. They know (at least on a subconscious level) that they don’t have the answers, and that if skeptics were heard the voters would flee… the only possible answer is to “win” through bully-boy tactics. Unleash the righteous indignation!”