There is a fascinating little article in today's (UK) Sunday Times, tracing how the Climate Change Sceptics have been deliberately excluded from the mainstream media and political argument for the last 5 years or so, but have managed to use blogs and other social media to reach their audience.
That this has been so is not really arguable anymore, the recent
ClimateGate emails also point to a deliberate attempt to squash debate - and potentially
even to falsify data, though hopefully the inquiry will get to the truth of that.
(An aside - I note with interest by the way that all the Pro Climate Change articles in the Sunday Times are online, all the sceptical ones are not (so I can't point to the one that interested me). Is this the way news will go - you have to pay for the stuff you don't want to hear? )
Anyhow, the point that really interested me is the role of blogging in getting a message out around what amounts to censorship. Yet again, the 'umble blog is emerging as the organ of free speech while the mainstream media yet again emerges as the chief sales organ of the Official Line. As it has with The Crunch and various other unpopular things wot White People don't like such as resistance to immigration etc etc. But of all the Secular Religions, the Climate Change one has taken the strongest hold.
It also strikes me that many who most deeply believe in it have the flimsiest grasp on the actual science, it seems to me that those who do know something about physics, maths or even - god forbid - actual thermodynamics, are those that are the more doubtful Thomasses. Not that many totally disagree you understand, just that scientifically trained people seem more aware of how unclear the underlying data is within the big picture of the Earth's warming and cooling cycles, especially regarding Man-Made global warming.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of reducing fossil fuel usage, pollution, wasted resources making tat etc etc, but I think there is a huge risk in drinking all the the Climate Change Cult Kool Aid, as much of it has more to do with money and power than ecology and will lead to the wrong decisions if not challenged - a view I note that the original Climate Change scientists are also now airing. I think it is entirely possible to be Green and not to take man made Global Warming seriously.
This especially scares me looking at the hoo-ha around Copenhagen, which seems - to me, anyway - to be moving further and further away from a rational debate about mitigating the impacts of an increasingly resource hungry world, and more and more towards a politico-industrial summit to bed down the huge amounts of money at stake in promoting techniques like Carbon Trading (which is based largely on such sensible ideas as trading CDO's - a technique which did so well for our Financial industries in 2008. Nuff said)
So whether you agree with Climate Change or not, whether you agree its man made or not, it is a very scary thing when half the debate is stifled by those who have access to power, whatever side they are on.
And for that reason, I think we have to fight for the rights of Social Media tools liek blogs tohave proper freedom of speech, to free our data, and to be logged on all search engines (never mind Net Neutrality, I want Link Neutrality)
I say this partly to provoke, of course - but it does occur to me that many in the Social Media Set just
love blogs etc when they espouse the
right causes but are often the first to cry for
curbs to freedom of speech when they don't.
