Scientists in hiding

[Christopher Booker] Right from the start, one of the more conspicuous features of the global warming cause has been the way its adherents felt the need to elevate their belief system into a rigid orthodoxy, a ‘consensus’ not to be challenged. They deal with challenges not through scientific debate, but by denouncing the dissenters as being beyond the pale.

The ‘sceptics’ are demonised as Flat Earthers, equivalent to Holocaust deniers, who could only hold the views they do because they have been paid to do so by ‘Big Oil’. The only debate which can be allowed, as we saw confirmed by those Climategate emails, is that between the believers themselves, while anyone outside the faith, however knowledgeable, must be vilified as a dangerous heretic, excluded from scientific journals, forbidden to examine the often highly suspect data and condemned as being ‘anti-science’.

Such fanatical intolerance, in defence of pseudo-scientific causes which reflect the prejudices of the age, has become only too common.