i was watching a documentary on climate change last night. admittedly, it was from 2006, right at the height of the apocalypse. but both al gore and a climate scientist were comparing climate-change skeptics to holocaust deniers. now i say that when that is your approach, the claim to be talking for science is absurd. to express skepticism about the data etc is to be a monster. i propose to you that a scientific inquiry cannot be conducted at all on this basis. if the wrong results show that you are a monster who must be repressed, then the science cannot be, is not being, pursued. it is far more like the enforcement of theological orthodoxy by the medieval catholic church - complete with burning at the stake - than like the open inquiry we'd associate with science.

the holocaust-denial analogy is enough to sustain the skepticism: science has an institutional and social/political context, and that context right now is one in which no result is plausible: the motivations for taking a particular position are too disconnected from the question of truth. we're devoted to trying to eliminate the opposition by slander, or by any means whatever: it is a moral imperative to repress data that throw the thing into question. imagine what it would be like to be a climate-change skeptic in a university environment. what you have to understand is that this discredits the scientific status of the dominant position.

all of this, of course, does not decide or even really bear on the question of whether and to what extent and why the climate is warming, either way. but it has to make you think twice about just nodding along. these folks are trying to produce by shame and preachery a total consensus. then they're claiming to speak on behalf of neutral science. it's ridiculous.

now just to worry the holocaust-denier analogy for a moment: there is all the difference in the world between denying an extremely-well-documented historical event, and questioning predictions about the future made on extremely complex grounds. one thing you might notice: the predictions are all over the place, though there is a contest to come up with the most dire, because in this situation, the "scientist" issuing the most dire predictions is the morally best person. there is no historical question, essentially, about the existence and scope of the holocaust. obviously, there are a million open questions in the climate change debate. now the best moral posture might be to assume that the most dire predictions are true. that, of course, does not show that they're true.