Closing out dissent
By Professor Bob Carter August 1, 2010, originally published at Quadrant Online, portions republished here with permission.
The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence
Scientists who venture to make independent statements in public about environmental myths soon come to learn about two post-modern-science tactics used to suppress their views – namely, disinvitation and the application of a brotherhood of silence. How these tactics work is explained in this article.
The modus operandi
A member of the organising committee for one or another conference comes to one of my talks, or chances to meet a friend who has attended. Enthusiasm thereby arises for me to speak at the conference that is being planned. 
Prompted by the member, the conference committee approves an invitation, which I accept. Later, the Council or governing body of the society in question gets to “rubber stamp” the conference program and someone says: “Bob Carter as a plenary speaker! You must be joking”. The disinvitation follows, sometimes well after the talk has been written and travel booked.
In a variation on this, earlier this year I was invited by our ABC to contribute an opinion piece about climate change to their online blog site, The Drum. The piece was duly written and tendered, only to be declined.
Similarly, strong control has long been exercised by public broadcasters ABC and SBS against the appearance of independent scientists on their TV and radio news and current affairs programs. I first encountered this in 2007, when I participated in a broadcast discussion about Martin Durkin’s epoch-making documentary film, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Before the broadcast I had the astonishing experience of being successively invited, disinvited, prevaricated with and then finally invited to participate again, as competing interests inside the ABC battled, as they obviously saw it, to control the outcome of the panel discussion.
I have generally viewed these and similar experiences over the years as amusing irritations that go with the territory of scientific independence. But the matter starts to become offensive, and indeed sinister, when it transpires that scientists from CSIRO, and other IPCC-linked research groups in Australia, have been behind particular disinvitations; or, even more commonly, have refused to participate in public debate on climate change.
The same self-appointed guardians of the sanctity of IPCC climate propaganda also strive ceaselessly to prevent invitations from being issued in the first place. For example, when it was suggested to a Sydney metropolitan university that I might give a talk on the campus, their Distinguished (sic) Professor of Sustainability responded that:
he would not be interested in allowing anyone to present a point of view which did not support the fact that human-generated carbon dioxide has caused global warming.
Que?
Engineers Australia (Sydney)
On July 8th this year, at the invitation of the Chairman of the Electrical & ITE Branch, Engineers Australia Sydney, I delivered a lecture on climate change in Chatswood to an attentive audience of about 55 practicing engineers, retired engineers and engineering students.
EA (Sydney) run a series of about 22 such lectures every year for the continuing professional development of their members. The intent is to impart knowledge to the engineering fraternity on current subjects of interest, and lecturers are generally recognized as leaders in the field of the subject that they present.
When controversial topics are involved, the institute attempts to attract speakers who will illustrate different aspects of the debate, as indeed they did on this occasion. For the lecture that I delivered was intended to be one of a pair, in which the other speaker would explain the reasons behind the federal government’s preference for using United Nations (IPCC) advice as the basis for Australian climate policy.
Significantly, CSIRO were asked, and declined, to provide such a speaker, thereby exemplifying the brotherhood of silence, i.e. the long-held ban that all IPCC-linked research groups strive to inflict upon independent scientists by refusing to debate with them as equals on a public platform. Earlier this year, CSIRO chairperson Megan Clarke boasted that her organisation had 40 persons involved in advising the IPCC, yet not one of them was available to talk to Australia’s major engineering professional institute? Pull the other one, Megan.
Well, if CSIRO is not prepared to explain the basis for government’s science policy then there’s always the universities, so a Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at another Sydney metropolitan university was approached to participate as the second speaker. He too declined on the grounds that the envisaged two-lecture format was “flawed”, adding:
You would not have an “anti-gravity” person debate gravity and since there honestly is no debate in this space in SCIENCE the offer I made a little while ago of offering a full day to detail the science to your members stand(s).
Your society risks falling into the trap of the media in believing there is debate and that is sad, misleading and unfortunate.
This stance was supported by an experienced NSW power engineer who wrote to EA at about the same time to malign my professional standing, and who included, for good measure, a gratuitous remark about the well-regarded London publisher of my recent book on climate change, viz.:
It appears that Bob Carter is representative of the group of the relatively little-published 2% group of scientists who generally are not mainly working in real climate science (Bob Carter is a geologist not a climate scientist, and is published in You-tube and popular magazines, not peer-reviewed journals), who oppose the real climate science consensus. This appears to be correct based on your notice of the meeting and his website. In this case he does not deserve equal time to the 98% of scientists regularly published on climate change in peer-reviewed journals. There is no counter consensus! I question the wisdom of giving this man the Engineers Australia podium.
Furthermore, Stacey International is a publisher of popular works and has no specific scientific credibility.
These examples both involve the citation of private letters. Other engineers blatantly attain the same ends of denigration or censorship in full public gaze. For example, ANU’s Tony Kevin wrote recently in an invited address in Canberra to the Australian Council of Engineering Deans:
I am not going to dwell on climate change denialism. The science is in. Climate crisis denialism should simply be condemned as a socially disruptive cognitive disorder. It seduces people who are psychologically unwilling to admit limits to economic growth. Denialists cling to the arrogant “mechanical philosophy” of mankind’s infinite right and capacity to exploit and transcend his natural environment. Or, they suffer from a kind of morally indifferent, fatalistic nihilism.
Like other cognitive disorders that have in the past caused great suffering to humanity, climate denialism is impervious to observed facts. As the climate crisis worsens, denialism perversely flourishes even more, confusing the community and eroding public support for sound risk-averse policies.
Needless to say, all these statements, both the private and the public, are a confused farrago of mostly ad hominem nonsense. It is disturbing, to say the least, that organisations and persons who would be quick to claim professional status consider that it is their current duty to disparage, or to refuse to debate with, or to muzzle scientists whose views on climate change they apparently disagree with.
Disturbing too is the fact that for at least the last twenty years the practitioners of environmentalism and climate alarm have made it their business to exert special influence on our younger citizens. Many parents have shared the experience of being horrified by the imbalance of information that their children from time to time come home from school with about iconic environmental issues. The indoctrination continues, of course, at university, and through into the junior workforce.
An exemplary case follows next of the way in which the views of young Australians are manipulated.
…
Conclusions
The scientific behaviour described in this article is pathological, for the essence of scientific methodology is the free sharing of data, and the unfettered and unprejudiced discussion of those data. Issuing statements of “consensus” or “authority” is antithetical to good science, and especially so in circumstances where the originating organisations have been established with political intent, have acted to restrict public debate or have a financial conflict of interest. Those familiar with the global warming issue will know that (IPCC) authority rules, despite it being well known that some IPCC practitioners of warming alarmism have flouted correct scientific procedures since the 1990s. And, anyway, a science truth is so not because the IPCC, the Royal Society or the Minister for Science asserts it to be so, but because it is based upon a hypothesis that has survived repeated testing by many independent scientists.
The behaviour is not just pathological. It is also part of a much wider pattern of science degradation that has developed since the 1980s. The change has been caused in part by the insistence of politicians that taxpayers’ money must be used in support of scientific research that is “useful” or “in the national interest”. Such superficial diktats are attractive to bureaucrats and businessmen, but they have proved to be a recipe for turning scientists from experts in problem solution into experts in (insoluble) problem creation. Given the persistence of such attitudes, Australia will never see the Tasmanian forests, the Murray-Darling River or the Great Barrier Reef “saved”, and nor will we ever be free from the ogre of human-caused climate change.
…. more
read the rest of this article at Quadrant Online here
Professor Bob Carter is a stratigrapher and marine geologist at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia). I had the honor of being accompanied by him and having him chair several of the events on the tour.
His new book in the Stacey International Independent Thinkers series is Climate: the Counter Consensus, which summarises the scientific and sociological and policy aspects of the global warming debate.
Available here:
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This is what green jobs look like.
http://www.duluthshippingnews.com/trains/wind-turbine-train-2-departs-duluth/
“The second and last of two trains that carried wind turbine parts originally loaded onto two ships in Denmark and discharged at Duluth left the Port Terminal today (June 22, 2010).”
===============
Yes, the port is working, the railroad is working, but it is still taxpayer money being squandered.
When was the last time a “green” project, begged for money?
Why beg, when you can hardly spend the money being thrown at you.
u.k.(us) says:
August 1, 2010 at 5:13 pm
This is what green jobs look like.
http://www.duluthshippingnews.com/trains/wind-turbine-train-2-departs-duluth/
==================
BTW, I like the site, am afraid it might now get overloaded?
It sounds like Professor Carter is dealing with a pack of prepubescent girls intent on shunning those who aren’t wearing the latest fashion.
Prof. Carter’s paper gives a new meaning to the term “Political Science”.
Historians will look back on this period and be dismayed. How on earth did this happen? The Oz election is in full swing and nobody is talking about Bob’s Plan B, a rational and commonsense view of climate change.
Jennifer Marohasy’s ‘Least worst climate policy?’ is worth a read.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/08/least-worst-climate-policy
“Trust me: if you were a PhD student between 1890 and 1960 in geology, your chance of publishing a paper about the “plates” would have been NULL.”
Continental Drift was certainly accepted in Victoria University, Wellington in 1960. “Plate Tectonics” is merely a name change.
I subscribe to a popular “Scientist” magazine and am astounded to see that in the latest issue they have an editorial bemouning the fact that a leading “alarmist” scientist has been unfairly attacked by “ruthless climate sceptics, drowning them in freedom of information requests and subjecting them to viscious personal attacks”. Having read much of the Climategate email material – my assesment is that the attacks were fully justified. Not necessarily because of the personal attacks that were made on “climate sceptic scientists” but most significantly because of the obvious manipulation of the “peer review” process. This is a massive fraud and in any other sphere of human endeavour would be a criminal offense.
On a number of occasions I have written comments in on-line fora asking questions of the alarmists – on at least two of these my posts have been moderated out and not published… no bad language, no personal attack, just questions! This is to me evidence that a concerted campaign of suppression is occuring in the media as well as in the scientific press.
Keep up the good work Bob!
The Bankers and other money men can see a way of foisting derivitives substitutes on us via “Carbon Trading” schemes and the like. You don’t think mere science is going to be allowed to stop the sharpies with the nasty haircuts from stealing a few billion from the rest of us, do you?
The CAGW gravy train has already it the buffers. The current screaming we hear from the media will not be able to resurrect the bleeding mess. The few survivors will have a difficult time ahead as government research money is quietly withdrawn.
Things are a good deal worse than what Bob suggests, but I disagree with his assertion that the politics are “disturbing”. Being disturbed is counterproductive.
The following caught my attention:
“[…] It seduces people who are psychologically unwilling to admit limits to economic growth. Denialists cling to the arrogant “mechanical philosophy” of mankind’s infinite right and capacity to exploit and transcend his natural environment. Or, they suffer from a kind of morally indifferent, fatalistic nihilism. […]”
Such severe misunderstanding underscores the need for a richer vocabulary to better differentiate the variety of viewpoints.
I advocate “nonalarmist” for hardcore environmentalists (like myself) who are fighting the politics that have made a train wreck of true environmental causes via erroneous conflation with anthropogenic climate fantasy.
Kudos to Carter for the integrity to uphold the scientific method, and the guts to do so against the climate alarmists entrenched moneyed interests.
—
As a physician, I find it altogether remarkable that Tony Kevin – an engineer, it seems? – should feel qualified to make a (remote) diagnosis of “socially disruptive cognitive disorder.”
Isn’t that the practice of medicine without a license?
And if Mr. Kevin is a doctor, isn’t such remote diagnosis a violation of professional ethics and of prevailing standard of care, and thus malpractice?
Could it even be possible that the person to whom Mr. Kevin addressed his communication could take him seriously, or grant credence to any of Mr. Kevin’s assertions?
The account provided by Dr. Carter draws to my mind the impression of encounters I’ve had with the advocates of “creation science” and the same “Nurmee!-Nurmee!-Nurmee!-I’m-not-listening!” responses ever and always to be gotten from these cement-headed specimens.
Could it be that the warmists are destined to join the devotees of L. Ron Hubbard in open and complete recourse to a quest for recognition as a religion?
—
To those who ask “why” the AGW proponents don’t play fair: they were turned into Socialists in college. Socialism in it’s modern form IS indistinguishable from a religion.
Now here is where I take this to place you folks probably haven’t been yet.
Socialism isn’t an economic system nor a governance system, it is 100% pure piracy and if successful, slavery. The stated goals of Socialism are 100% pure BS camouflage, never listen to what they say, watch what they do. The leaders of Socialist movements are NOT ideologues, they are pirates. The REAL goal of Socialism is the control of an entire nations wealth by one man. The “sharing the wealth” or “redistribution of wealth” is simply paying the troops, in this case for their votes.
The “scientists” plying the AGW trade have obvious motive for their intransigence, federal funding. The left is highly experienced at wielding the stick along with the carrot to get their ends the means to succeed. The politically naive scientists get hookered & schnookered by their Socialist indoctrination they received in Academia instead of a complete education. Money talks & deniers walk. There has been billions handed out to those willing to play along with AGW and career ending moments for those unwilling. Classic carrot & stick. Watching the dishonesty in What WAS science is disheartening, then I remember the Edison & Tesla AC/DC media blitz of dishonesty by Edison. In this case though the stakes are the survival of western civilization.
Alexander Feht says:
August 1, 2010 at 1:42 pm
“[…] be an offense of the worst possible kind. It is highly disturbing that such totalitarian freaks are living among us, and are given the preferential treatment by our elected officials and Academia. What a plague.”
This is in effect what the Norwegian Foreign Minister said too. About sceptics.
I agree with Alexander about that kind of people.
Thanks once again to Prof. Carter for his clear-headededness; when the Tim Flannery’s of the world are grabbing headllines, he and Jo Nova and a few others are always there to remind us that pockets of sanity do exist down under.
That said, I would offer a couple of minor corrections:
The scientific behaviour described in this article is pathological. “Scientific” & “Pathological” are 100% mutually exclusive terms; I suggest you strike “scientific.”
.
. . . they have proved to be a recipe for turning scientists from experts in problem solution into experts in (insoluble) problem creation. I suggest that “problem definition” or similar would be better in the present context. If the architect Le Corbusier was right when he wrote that “The well-stated problem finds its own solution”, then the converse must be equally true: A mis-stated or poorly stated problem can never be solved. The Climate Cabal has almost the entire world chasing its tale and wasting obscene amounts of resources over a problem that has never been clearly stated, if it even exists.
The are hopeful signs, however, and Prof Carter touched on one: The ratcheting up both of hysterical propaganda and smear tactics are clear signs of desperation; the Cabal & its flacks know only too well that their gravy train is about to run off the rails.
OTOH, it was really depressing to read a professional engineer resort to liberal arts psycho-drivel. I hope he’s an anomaly, and that the one sector of society that seemed immune to moral preening hasn’t been infected.
Rivenburg says:
August 2, 2010 at 11:30 am
To those who ask “why” the AGW proponents don’t play fair: they were turned into Socialists in college. Socialism in it’s modern form IS indistinguishable from a religion….
_________________________________________________________________
I consider it a form of feudalism. With the elite as the new aristocracy and the rest of us serfs who are not even considered “human”
“What unites the many different forms of Socialism.. is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control…” http://search.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/0-2souls.htm
The land policy: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) – Vancouver, May 31 – June 11, 1976. Agenda Item 10, The Preamble states::
“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable….” http://www.sovereignty.net/p/land/unproprts.htm
Maurice Strong and the Commission on Global Governance:
* “…countries are having to accept that in certain fields, sovereignty has to be exercised collectively, particularly in respect of the global commons.”
But the really chilling quote is from Obama’s Chief Science Adviser, John Holden.’In their 1973 book “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” Holdren and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote:
“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being“
That means you are not human unless given the essential early socializing experiences therefore they do not even recognize babies as human until AFTER they have been indoctrinated or dissenters as human at all!
“Either you have a right to own property, or you are property.” – E. Wayne Hage, March 1992
Sean says:
August 1, 2010 at 8:22 am
The real irony of all the nonsense such as “the debate is over” the refusal to debate in a public forum, the ostracizing of people like Drs. Bob Carter and Judith Curry, etc. is that it is not working. The public are a lot smarter than the intellectuals believe. They have particularly sensitive noses for bull—t when they know the action recommended on the bull will be ineffecgtive but is going to cost them money, jobs and possibly much more. Poll after poll rank climate change dead last as a problem to devote resources to at this time and the numbers who think its even a problem that might ever need to be fixed are declining as well. Its time the intellectuals emerge from the bubble and start dealing with the real world both scientifically and politically.
Intellectuals dealing with the real world? Surely you jest.
Ralph says:
August 1, 2010 at 9:58 am
>>DocWat says: August 1, 2010 at 7:11 am
>>Someone help me here… WHY?? I just do not understand
>>why the “warmists” are doing these things.
No, the REAL puzzle, is why are they doing this across the majority of the world. We have always had one or two looney nations – but an entire planet?
Now we have a global media that can spread the virus in seconds. This didn’t exist in the past and the lack of a vectoring mechanism limited the effects of cultural contagion.
Dishman says:
August 1, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Tony Kevin wrote:
It seduces people who are psychologically unwilling to admit limits to economic growth. Denialists cling to the arrogant “mechanical philosophy” of mankind’s infinite right and capacity to exploit and transcend his natural environment.
He has it backwards.
The Alarmists are clinging to their belief that “It’s all down hill from here”, attempting to prove the necessity of failure and death.
… attempting to justify their own inadequacy.
It is neither true nor necessary.
We are all of us inadequate, yet somehow we manage to muddle through and get the job done. Accept it, get over it, stop worrying about it.
Just don’t try to force others into failure to justify your own perceived failure.
When I was three, the girl next door and I fell into a shallow pond together. The water was shallow enough that we could easily stand in it. She didn’t want to get wet, so she tried to climb on top of me. In attempting to avoid the minor indignity, she nearly killed me.
I often hear ‘environmentalists’ saying that “A lot of us are going to have to die”.
Wouldn’t it be better to just admit that you don’t understand how we muddle through?
Thanks Dishman, I get the same sense.
A pessimistic nihilism pervades the AGW movement. There seems to be a total inability to see humans as genuinely capable of innovation and creativity. This I think stems from a total ignorance and distrust of genuine science and technology and an total inability to actually participate in innovative and creative acts.
Girma says:
“Two more freezing winters and we will uncork the champagne.”
Nothing expresses the dominant worldview on this site more succinctly than this. Just two lucrative ski seasons, and all this noise about ACC will fade into memory.
He’s balls-up wrong, of course, just as the dominant views in both the majority and minority camps are almost certainly wrong. I think the “deniers” are more wrong than the “alarmists” — a stance that will certainly earn me opprobrium and ridicule on this particular forum. But I cannot entirely accept the “consensus” thinking, either. Those fellows seem to lack any sense of planetary time.
As a rational, scientifically trained person, I cannot believe that the dramatic decline in glacial and polar ice is coincidental to the release of hundreds of billions of tons of previously fossilised carbon into the atmosphere, which we treat more or less like an open sewer. While it is possible that the warming phenomenon is related to solar output or some other natural variable, that appears extremely unlikely, given the sheer rapidity of the process.
With apologies to those who adhere to a literal belief in the geological timescape defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, the energy contained in all those hydrocarbons we’ve use was accumulated over hundreds of millions of years. We’ve burned through it in a relative instant. It’s counter-intuitive and absurd to believe that such an extraordinary process could unfold without significant changes to global climate (although I can see why it would be comforting to cling to the idea that it could).
On the other hand, predicting what those changes will be — especially on a time scale of anything less then a century or four — is a fool’s errand, unless we accept from the get-go that the uncertainties involved can never be substantively extinguished.
But we *can* be rather sure about is the principle of inertia. There are any number of factors mitigating *toward* climate stability, and factoring against climate change, as evidence by the age, size and strength of the prevailing climatic systems. Two years is utterly meaningless. So is 20.
The industrial revolution is rather older than that. I do believe that most of the changes we are seeing are indeed anthropogenic, but may have more to do with cumulative emissions from before 1970 — or 1910 — than they do with emissions since 2000. Those would seem like to make themselves felt much later in the century.
So I’m inclined to believe those who talk about practical irreversibility, catastrophic warming, tipping points and the like. I think it’s obvious now, but none of us is likely to see an extinction level event. Our great-grandchildren might, and their great-grandchildren almost certainly will. It may well occur even if we were able to scrub every post-industrial ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the next fortnight — there will be consequences, and there’s probably not a damn thing we can do about it.
So fire away. Call me an “alarmist” or whatever the epithet du jour is. But don’t accuse me of “suppressing” you or your worldview. I’m happy to listen to what you have to say. In your tireless campaign to poke holes in the climate change “consensus,” you compel people to hone to the facts (even if it appears many of you choose to ignore those that make you uncomfortable — the rigidly true fact that different atmospheric compositions trap heat at different rates, for example).
So I respect your views, I respect your rights to air them, and I respect your right to accuse me of being a brainless sheep. And I really couldn’t care less whether some of you are corporate PR people or not.
But if you *really* believe we could have consumed so much energy so rapidly in terrestrial context without meaningful long-term consequences, I believe you’re a damned fool.
Richard Latker says:
“But if you *really* believe we could have consumed so much energy so rapidly in terrestrial context without meaningful long-term consequences, I believe you’re a damned fool.”
Show us your ‘long term consequences’ of climate catastrophe [because minor changes are insignificant, and don’t matter]. Use empirical evidence; models don’t count.
What?! You don’t have any real world, testable, reproducible evidence for CAGW?? Then your bogus claim of being “a rational, scientifically trained person” is as risible as circus clowns driving a miniature car and claiming to be competent drivers.
The verifiable fact that the current climate is well within the parameters of natural variability falsifies your emotional panic. Nothing unusual is occurring. Nothing! But despite that fact, you are simply another True Believer in the bogus catastrophic AGW scare, thoroughly frightened of the black cat under your bed — but of course, there is no cat there. And there never was.
Richard Latker says:
August 3, 2010 at 4:45 am
Nothing expresses the dominant worldview on this site more succinctly than this. Just two lucrative ski seasons, and all this noise about ACC will fade into memory.[–snip rest–]
Your post reminds me of the argument that using solar power is in essence ‘taking’ energy from the Sun, and it will eventually have consequence.
Were we —the rest of us— to take YOU are your word, then all of humanity would be sent to the death chambers, if only that humanity is using a source of energy.
Well, what about all of the other creatures here on this planet?
Do not THEY use energy too?
Do not THEY use the Earth as a toilet as well?
Yet here YOU are pointing fingers at the rest of US whilst YOU play the hypocrisy game.
Get this straight: When YOU point a finger at someone else, you actually end up pointing THREE MORE fingers right back at yourself!
899 says:
“Your post reminds me of the argument that using solar power is in essence ‘taking’ energy from the Sun, and it will eventually have consequence.”
It shouldn’t because that statement makes no sense. The point was that the solar energy was stored and accumulated in large quantities and over an extremely long period of time. We’re then burning through all that concentrated (now as chemical) energy in an extremely short period of time.
“899 says:
August 3, 2010 at 5:53 am
Richard Latker says:
August 3, 2010 at 4:45 am
Nothing expresses the dominant worldview on this site more succinctly than this. Just two lucrative ski seasons, and all this noise about ACC will fade into memory.[–snip rest–]
“Were we —the rest of us— to take YOU are your word, then all of humanity would be sent to the death chambers, if only that humanity is using a source of energy.”
Uh, what?
“Well, what about all of the other creatures here on this planet?”
There’s no comparison. In biomass per joule, our energy use is orders of magnitude higher than any other animal. That’s nice — our access to such high levels of directable energy lies at the heart of the human experience — but to expect that it does not have consequences is absurd.
Have to keep this brief. My lengthy reply to Smokey didn’t post. While I’m pleased to engage intellectual adversaries, the playing field has to be level, and I’m not going to waste time writing without an assurance that the result will appear.
The rules said something about bulk editing — by keyword? If so, I’m not sure how to play by the rules.
Bob, you and Ian Plimer would have to be my favourite fellow Australians these days. I can’t tell you how much I admire your courage in standing up to “Our ABC” and the CSIRO for starters. Consider this, though, your work has probably already had a very influential effect in informing our parliamentarians. They wouldn’t admit this of course otherwise they would get pilloried by the mainstream media (of which 0.00001% would have any training in science or could consider scientific issues with an open mind).
Apologies to Lawrence Solomon for not knowing before about his 2009 article on “disinvitation”, which I have just stumbled across. See:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/02/27/lawrence-solomon-the-art-of-the-green-disinvite.aspx
As we all already knew, and this earlier article reinforces, the phenomenon started long ago, and is both persistent and worldwide.
Bob