Climate change: responding to minimizers

Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal opinion section published “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate” by Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser.  The authors foresee that the United Nations Conference on Climate Change opening today in Paris will end in one more toothless agreement—and they are not at all unhappy about that. 

Ridley is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal.  A very successful science writer, blogger, and market enthusiast, he is also a Viscount and Conservative member of the British House of Lords.  In identifying him, the Journal always notes that “he has an interest in coal mining on his family lands.”  Peiser, a social anthropologist interested in climate change “catastrophism,” directs something called the Global Warming Policy Forum. 

As a pessimistic student of politics, I fear that their negative appraisal of the Paris conference may prove accurate.  But as a total non-student of climate science, I am in need of help.  Little in the backgrounds and apparent ideological commitments of these writers leads me to give their arguments the benefit of the doubt.  But should I simply dismiss them? 

Go online, I tell myself, and just enter in the authors’ names, the Wall Street Journal, and the name and date of the article.  Within a day or two, substantial critiques will pop up. 

No such luck. 

I entertain two hypotheses.  Because my online skills are weak (that’s not a hypothesis, it’s a fact), the substantial critiques are there but lurking out of my sight or the sight of anyone similarly unskilled.  Alternatively, those worried about global warming just don’t consider these people—or the reach of the Wall Street Journal!—serious enough to mount a response. 

Either hypothesis raises questions about how we conduct a rational debate about a subject of great importance but demanding some degree of evaluating claims to expertise. 

Here are some of the claims that Ridley and Peiser make. My instinct is to reject them, at least many of them.  But I need help. 

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