John Vidal: Eco Soundings: September 24 2008 | Environment | The Guardian

What happens to hardline Thatcherite economists when they've taken redundancy from the Treasury, DTI or the Daily Mail? They end up becoming hardline climate change sceptics writing tosh for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)and getting visiting professorships at the University of Buckingham. The latest tome, from Ian Byatt, David Henderson, Russell Lewis, et al, is called Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists, and is remarkable, even by IEA standards, for its dullness and scientific illiteracy. Eco Soundings wonders if the authors, most of whom must be over 70, should rethink their outrage at society being asked to fork out about $25bn a year to tackle climate change, when it's costing governments several trillion dollars to tackle the dodgy bankers.

IEA Blog » Blog Archive » Rampant ageism in the Guardian

The Guardian’s environment editor, John Vidal, cannot resist a swipe at the IEA’s latest publication, Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists. Vidal doesn’t address any of the arguments in the book, but rather dismisses it as ‘tosh’ written by authors ‘most of whom must be over 70’.

To describe the book as ‘tosh’ is par for the course, even though it is not a very well informed comment given that like all IEA publications the book has undergone a rigorous process of academic peer-review, unlike the writings of Guardian journalists it might be said. But to dismiss the authors’ views on the basis of their age is astonishing.

This is a classic example of the argumentative strategy in which the personal characteristics of one’s opponent are attacked rather than their arguments. It is used by those who are not confident in the strength of their own arguments.

It is remarkable that a politically correct newspaper like the Guardian has published such explicit ageism. I’d be curious to know at what age John Vidal believes people’s views no longer count? Perhaps if the IEA had published a weaker book with younger authors the Guardian would be willing to engage with its arguments, but for those who are interested in serious analysis of these most important issues, rather than personal abuse, I highly recommend reading this new publication.

New publication: Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists

There is currently a consensus amongst the political establishment – and amongst the intellectual communities that feed into it – that detailed and wide-ranging government intervention is necessary to combat the effects of climate change. This monograph challenges that consensus.

The authors look in detail at a number of the underlying assumptions and proposals of the policy activists and find that there is enormous uncertainty relating both to the economics and to the science of climate change. As one author shows, the policy activists have form: alarmists have been wrong, time and time again, about ecological disasters.