One way critics are silenced is by accusing them of ignoring “peer-reviewed science.” Yet oftentimes, peer reviews are nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers nodded through by experts and others given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it.

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt like the object of a witch-hunt. One individual who was once on the board of the Sierra Club has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. A series of articles on climate change issues I wrote for The Nation elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found astounding – and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many years.

There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s,” because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer, of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is an element of witch-hunting in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word “denier” to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. “Climate change denier” is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier.

In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link between fear-mongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism about a population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the U.S. where there has never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear.

I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts telling them what they can and cannot think about climate change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open discussion and through a “battle of ideas,” as the conference I spoke at in London last year described it. I hope my book is a salvo in that battle.  Source

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