- Sixty global warming “campaigners” signed a letter calling on the media to keep skeptics out of their coverage.
- In their public letter, signatories said they would no longer appear in the media alongside their critics.
- “We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real.”
Dozens of politicians, environmentalists, scientists and other global warming 
activists signed a letter announcing their refusal to take part in public debates with people critical of their global warming claims — in the name of science, of course.
“We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real. It is real. We need to act now or the consequences will be catastrophic,” reads the letter signed by 60 self-described “campaigners.”
The letter, published in The Guardian on Sunday, calls on the media to end the “false equivalence between an overwhelming scientific consensus and a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests” when it comes to global warming.
“As campaigners and thinkers who are led by science and the precautionary principle, and who wish to debate the real and vital issues arising from human-triggered climate change, we will not assist in creating the impression that climate denial should be taken seriously by lending credence to its proponents, by entertaining ideas that lack any basis in fact,” they wrote.
“Therefore we will no longer debate those who deny that human-caused climate change is real. There are plenty of vital debates to be had around climate chaos and what to do about it; this is simply no longer one of them. We urge broadcasters to move on, as we are doing,” they wrote.
Climate scientist Judith Curry, a veteran researcher and skeptic of claims of catastrophic warming, noted that “few of these signatories could credibly debate the complex science of what is causing climate change and its impacts.”
Very few of these signatories could credibly debate the complex science of what is causing climate change and its impacts, and how climate might change in the 21st century.
— Judith Curry (@curryja) August 27, 2018
Michael Liebreich, a prominent U.K. conservative and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, chastised the 60 letter signatories for running from public debates.
Oh dear, 60 bien-pensant climate experts refuse to do do media if their views will be challenged. Climate change, its impacts and responses have to be debated. If an anti-science idiot is on the show, just mock them with their previous stupid statements. https://t.co/sbCCEmP17L
— Michael Liebreich (@MLiebreich) August 27, 2018
Refusing to debate those skeptical of catastrophic global warming is nothing new. A similar trend emerged a few years ago that included environmentalists and prominent scientists refusing to debate global warming skeptics in the media.
NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt refused to debate Roy Spencer, a skeptic climatologist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, on Fox Business in 2013. Schmidt came on the show, but would not appear on TV simultaneously with Spencer.
Fox Business host John Stossel also asked the Union of Concerned Scientists if they would debate Spencer, but they said doing so “would be doing the public a disservice because it would give [his] extreme ideas credibility.”
In another instance, Hollywood producer James Cameron cancelled a debate with Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano in 2010, Morano told The Daily Caller News Foundation in 2014.
“In 2010, I was set to debate Hollywood producer James Cameron after weeks of negotiations, only to have the debate cancelled at the last moment when my plane landed in Colorado for the debate,” said Morano, a prominent global warming skeptic.
The 60 signatories of the letter published in The Guardian dismissed concerns that calling for global warming skeptics to be marginalized infringed on their freedom of speech.
“Fringe voices will protest about ‘free speech,’” they wrote. “No one should prevent them from expressing their views, whether held cynically or misguidedly. However, no one is obliged to provide them with a platform, much less to appear alongside them to give the misleading impression that there is something substantive to debate.”
“When there is an article on smoking, newspapers and broadcasters no longer include lobbyists claiming there are no links to cancer. When there’s a round-the-world yacht race we don’t hear flat-earthers given airtime: ‘This is madness; they’ll sail off the edge!’ the letter’s signatories wrote.
Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter
This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
