Dave's Archives

Here's a bit of everything for the new year — some hopes for what we could and should be doing as a nation, in no particular order.

We must address the asylum seeker debate with decency, maturity and humility. We should accept many more refugees, and at the same time encourage other countries to do so too. There's really very little downside to this, save for the political ramifications of xenophobia. The world collectively might not be interested in finding a safe home for all its refugees, and so if we let refugees come to us, they will certainly continue to do so. We might prefer that their lives were not further jeopardised by the journey, but, having arrived, it's an utter perversion of human decency for us to turn them away, no matter how much we'd like to discourage further risky voyages. We must not create disincentives that rely on penalising innocent people; we have no right to play chess with human beings.

We must get some perspective on the economy; it is not a blanket reason for putting aside all other problems. Yes, it's important. No, we are not teetering on the edge of starvation. Panic is precisely the thing that causes economic problems in the first place. Basically, let the disinterested economic experts make rational, progressive decisions based on careful, objective modelling, and ensure there is a safety net for the poor. Everyone else, suck it up.

We must continue to insist that our politicians get off their conservative arses and legalise same-sex marriage. This is truly a no-brainer. The arguments against it are utterly, unequivocally spurious, and will dissipate like so much hot air once the requisite legislation is passed. Nobody opposes same-sex marrige for any substantive reason, but basically just "because". Once legalised, the whole "debate" will be relegated to the inane murmurings of ineffectual dinosaurs. (Do politicians fear a backlash from voters angry that their marriages are suddenly devoid of meaning following the gender requirements being dropped?)

For the love of humanity can we please redouble efforts to improve the health and living standards of those living in remote Aboriginal communities? Of course it won't be done in a year. It's not just about grand rhetorical gestures — though these have their place — and it's certainly not about sending in the army. We have a lot of smart, dedicated people who have been on the case for some time, and surely by now we've learnt a thing or two about what can usefully be done, given sufficient government funding.

The climate change debate is not over, and won't be for decades. We must not lose sight of the fact that the goal, in the end, is zero (or even negative) carbon emissions. The purpose of a carbon price is not simply to reduce emissions, but ultimately to price them out of existence. To make this work, alternatives must exist. Australia should, by all rights, be a world-leader in solar energy. We could be a world-leader in all kinds of renewable energy. Surely there is much more scope for public and private funding of renewable energy research. We might only contribute 1.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but renewable energy research could help reduce everyone's emissions, not just our own.

Recycled drinking water — get used to the idea, people. Water efficiency is vastly more important than your squeamishness; there's really no rational objection. Even now, the water you drink has already passed through the digestive tracts of a trillion different organisms, without any technological assistance. Water recycling is the lowest-hanging fruit for securing our water supplies (especially in places like Perth that are drying out). Why would we ignore it in favour of energy-intensive desalination  or enormous engineering works to transport water from thousands of kilometres away? Yes, we can build wind farms, tidal generators, etc. to power desalination plants, but we could be using that power to replace coal, not just to replace water.

The location of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) — the world's largest telescope, and one of the world's largest scientific projects — will be decided in 2012: either Australia or South Africa. Let's step back from the parochial contest. Australia might not get it, but would this be such a terrible outcome, all things considered? Maybe Africa would benefit more from this project than Australia. Besides the raw economics, the presence of such visible, cutting edge science must have some inspirational effect. Scientists can travel, but for young Africans trying to discern their opportunities in life, a local SKA would surely leave an impression.¹

Finally, in an Olympic year, let's not lose sight of our non-sporting heroes. A nation defined by sport is a nation not defined by its doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers and other professionals. Sport is exciting, and important in its own way, but not really on the same scale as curing illness, defending human rights, exploring the universe and creating things that have never existed before.

Now, you lot, get started on that while I take a holiday.

1. The same would be true of young Australians, but we are relatively spoiled for choice. [↩]

I've had another sudden fit of pseudo-artistic buffoonery.

I stumbled across the Galileo Movement largely by way of Wendy Carlisle's Background Briefing report:

In February this year a new group emerged: the Galileo movement. Its scientific advisers are the who's who of the international climate sceptics movement. Its patron is the powerful Sydney radio personality Alan Jones. The Galileo movement is aiming to kill the carbon tax, and it's aiming to do this through attacking the science of climate change.

This is a fabulously un-self-aware group of climate change denialists who liken their cause to that of Galileo, and who purport to offer the Real Truth of the Earth's climate. They are the living epitome of the Galileo gambit, which itself is much older and is described by RationalWiki as follows:

They made fun of Galileo, and he was right.
They make fun of me, therefore I am right.

I feel the following diagram adequately summarises the situation:

This is all very Australia-centric, of course, and wholly political, though they claim otherwise. The stated purpose of the Galileo Movement is merely to stop Australia's carbon tax - an entirely political goal - not to actually redress the horrific corruption of science they claim to be occurring. The "corruption of science" seems more like an excuse for their own political predicament than an actual problem that must be solved. If such systemic corruption of the scientific process was real, after all, it would be far worse a problem than any mere tax¹. However, the movement's scientific literacy is clearly razor-thin, with adorable statements like this:

We care about freedom, security, the environment, humanity and our future.

The Galileo Movement's co-founders are retirees Case Smit and John Smeed. Their business backgrounds are in science and engineering - science's real-world application. Their experience is in environmental protection and ensuring air quality.

At first they simply accepted politicians' claims of global warming blamed on human production of carbon dioxide (CO₂). When things didn't add up, they each separately investigated. Stunned, they discovered what many people are now discovering: climate claims by some scientists and politicians contradict observed facts.

Here's another theory: Case Smit and John Smeed have never been involved in actual climate-related research at all, but through some intrepid Googling discovered that People On The Internet were having arguments. A stunning revelation indeed. Not having any particular notion of what real science is actually supposed to look like, they simply believed those people who appeared to be more outraged. Just as in Galileo's time.

1. Denialists rarely realise the scale of the allegations they so casually make; if they did, they would have to confront their implausibility. [↩]

Until recently, I was a little confused by some of the standards being applied to the protagonists of the political debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). However, I've now drawn up a handy flow chart to help resolve the confusion.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger version.)

One of the most effective arguments against pricing carbon in Australia is that horrible rhetorical question: how much effect will it have in isolation? Carbon price opponents think they're onto a winner here, and their success (I think) has largely been in framing it as a national rather than a global issue.

In reality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a challenge confronting the whole world, collectively. We always knew it was going to be a hard sell, not least because each nation's contribution cannot really do anything by itself. There does need to be some sort of international agreement. Absent international agreement, and absent action from other countries, it's very easy to make the argument that a carbon price will not achieve anything. It won't.

But at this point in the discussion we've already come off the rails, thinking like helpless pessimists, rather than constructive realists. We cannot so easily entertain hypothetical international climate inaction, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and leads inevitably to the worst possible outcome. This is similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma. If a nation acts in isolation, it may disadvantage itself economically, but if all nations fail to act for this reason, they will suffer far worst than if they had co-operated. We must focus on international co-operation, not on how to "win" the ensuing chaos if co-operation fails.

It's not beyond us to figure this out. We must think beyond the immediate costs and benefits to our nation. Surely we are human beings before we are Australians. Thus, we must think of ourselves as global citizens, participating in a global debate on climate action and assessing the global costs and benefits thereof. Each investment in renewable energy or reduction in energy use benefits the whole world, not just the country in which it happens. The actual climatic effects of Australia's carbon price will be dispersed over all seven continents and five oceans, while Australians ourselves will experience only a small part of it. Indeed, every country will experience only a small portion of the benefits of their own actions.

This is antithetical to the selfish, nationalist perspective, which would question why others should benefit from our efforts. But that's the only way it can be - climate reality crushing the illusion of absolute national sovereignty. We cannot engineer a climate policy that is only in the national interest. We cannot employ a version of Maxwell's Demon to stand at the border and stop the flow of greenhouse gas molecules back and forth. Climate policy can only serve the global interest, or none at all.

There are many possible analogies. Consider income tax - if each taxpayer were to measure the effect of their own tax contribution on healthcare, education, law enforcement, etc., it would be infinitesimal. Why then should anyone pay tax? Your own tax contribution in isolation hardly benefits society at all. However, there are many people to share the tax burden, and together their contribution is very noticeable. The benefits to everyone of government spending - the opportunity to live in a safe, healthy and educated society - far outweigh whatever personal benefits those few thousand tax dollars were going to have¹.

If we convince ourselves that we matter more than society, or that Australia matters more that the rest of the world, we risk becoming obsessed not simply with helping ourselves, but with actively not helping others. It's not our responsibility, we tell ourselves, forgetting in our stubbornness that we have a stake in it. Selfishness turns into angry defensiveness, which turns into isolationism, and ultimately self-betrayal. Far from being a burden, the greater good is actually in our own personal and national interest. Climate policy is not about altruistically helping others (though that is certainly no bad thing). It is about helping ourselves by helping everyone.

1. Libertarians would insist otherwise, but I don't think they have a great deal of evidence on their side. [↩]

The Queensland flood disaster continues in tragic and dramatic fashion, though Sri Lanka and Brazil have it even worse. However, there is a yet more pressing concern in some quarters. You see, this isn't just about lost lives and property, but about the future of market economics. The real question is: how can we blame this on environmentalists?

You knew it was coming, at the back of your mind at least. After the devastating Victorian bushfires on Black Saturday last year, the media was awash with abuse. "Greenies" were held to be responsible for stopping controlled burns and preventing the clearing of bush around homes. It's quite reasonable to debate the extent of controlled burning; it's a complex issue. It's not reasonable to assume either (a) that unmitigated benefits follow from controlled burning, or (b) that all environmentalists are blindly opposed to it. Of course, that's precisely what happened, and more. It was not enough for Miranda Devine to advocate for more controlled burning. It was not even enough for her to chastise the entire green "ideology" as being wrong. This is what she had to say:

…it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

This time, we'll be told that environmentalists are responsible for preventing the construction of more and larger dams. Dams, dams, dams. Again, this has a passing element of truth to it - the proposed damming of the Mary River (the Traveston Crossing Dam) was delayed and then abandoned, partly due to the efforts of environmentalists concerned about the extinction or vulnerability of particular fish species. Of course, this was certainly not the only reason; some upstream communities and farmland would have been inundated, and there were also concerns about the dam's efficiency (with respect to leakage and evaporation). The Mary River did flood in the last few days, affecting a couple of towns along its length, but this certainly was not the epicentre of the disaster, and it's not clear to what extent the proposed dam would have helped*.

It would also be wrong to attribute the dam's demise just to the "environmentalists". Many local residents did not want it. Despite Tony Abbott's new dams epiphany, the state and federal Coalition have been firmly opposed to it. Only the state Labor government backed it.

Let's be clear that dams do have flood-mitigation capabilities, but we're talking mitigation, not prevention. By carefully managing outflows, dams can "spread out" flood flows over longer periods of time. The same total amount of water flows downstream as normal, but at a lower rate. Sometimes this is sufficient, and sometimes it is not. If a dam is full when the flood waters hit, or becomes full, there's no controlling the excess. Further, flash flooding might occur almost anywhere, and we're not about to start building enormous concrete dam walls across every valley in the country. (For reference, the Traveston Dam would have costed $1.7-1.8 billion; over $100,000 for each of the 16,454 people living in Gympie. Surely we can come up with more economical flood defences.)

So, you might think that nobody could seriously entertain the notion that greenies are responsible for the flood crisis, but just you watch**. It matters not that no dam could have contained the flood waters seen by Queenslanders. It matters not that a number of dams are already there and have demonstrably failed to hold back the flood waters. What matters is that "greenies" have tried to stop dams being built, and so by reverse psychology dams must be a good thing. What matters is the inevitable slander and innuendo from small sections of the media, wherein this issue is not one to be reported so much as fought and won.

One of my favourite fruitcakes, James Delingpole, is hot off the mark with a guest post by one of his regular commenters. Delingpole tries to juxtapose the plan to dam the Mary River against the Toowoomba/Lockyer Valley flash flooding. The strong implication is that lives were lost due to attempts to save the Mary River cod. This is utter nonsense - Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, where the deaths occurred, are nowhere near the Mary River. Nevertheless, Delingpole says of his commenter "Memory Vault":

He’s understandably upset about the Australian floods, which may have claimed more than 70 lives. But what really upsets him is that this disaster could have been prevented.

"Memory Vault" mumbles something about levees and dams, and about their not being finished, but never quite gets around to saying exactly what should have been done. His/her piece is mostly a rant against "CO2 AGW madness", filled with strained advocacy of the "theory of the cyclical nature , ocean and atmospheric [sic]", whatever that is supposed to be.

Thus, the fight is against climate science and its implications. It has long been predicted that increased global temperatures will lead to more extreme weather events. No single disaster can be definitively attributed to climate change, but at some point we must acknowledge that climate change has probably contributed.

It's unfortunate, but probably unavoidable, that people will perceive each new natural disaster by itself as evidence of climate change. This is not evidence per se; evidence for climate change comes in the form of hard numbers - temperatures, sea levels, frequency of cyclones, etc. However, while this unscientific reaction unfolds, there's an even more dubious counter-reaction determined to drown it out. Delingpole and others are utterly convinced that the environmentalist movement is the new communism; that green is the new red (hence the derogatory term "watermelon" for greenies assumed to be closet commies). It's not strictly important whether any of that environmentalist stuff is right or not. The important thing is that the greenies cannot be allowed to appear to be right, because then their secret communist ideals will permeate the establishment by stealth.

Nobody in Australia really thinks that dams are a magic bullet, but as long as environmentalists argue against them, the anti-environmentalists will argue for them.

** Not here though. I've escaped the wrath of the winged monkeys thus far, because this blog is a fairly small target.

Continuing on (a bit) from my last post, I'm going to examine another of Dennis Ambler's articles for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). This one is mostly a long rambling swipe at lots of different and very accomplished individuals, and not (as in the other case) an outright attempt to reinvent the laws of mathematics and statistics.

Here, Ambler focuses on a report written for the American National Academies, called Advancing the Science of Climate Change. He is apparently responding to an article in the Washington Post by Sherwood Boehlert, who quotes a key line from the report's summary:

A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.

This is the official, considered position of the American National Academies, and closely resembles a Q&A document released by the Australian Academy of Science:

The Earth’s climate has changed. The global average surface temperature has increased over the last century and many other associated changes have been observed. The available evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause. It is expected that, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at business-as-usual rates, global temperatures will further increase significantly over the coming century and beyond.

Ambler doesn't (here, at least) address the Australian statement, or any of the other statements issued by other national science academies and other scientific organisations around the world. We'll set that aside for now.

His point appears to be that the Panel on Advancing the Science of Climate Change (presumably responsible for the first quote) is stacked with advocates* of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). He goes into great detail about the nefarious activities of various board members, such as being IPCC authors, members of NGOs, members of advisory boards, having links to the United Nations and being either corporate- or government-funded. Scandalous, I know.

However, Ambler's entire argument rests on the notion that the aforementioned organisations have already somehow been discredited. That may be true in his head, because the IPCC says all the things he doesn't like to hear. However, there is no objective reason to think that the IPCC is not essentially fulfilling its intended function: the careful, objective assessment of the science behind climate change and its implications. His argument also relies on the assumption from the outset that the AGW consensus does not exist. If consensus is real, then it's hard to imagine what could be wrong with having such a panel "stacked" with those who've poured their energies into addressing the problem.

Ambler's other complaint is one I've heard repeated for other advocates of climate action - that they're not climate scientists:

I doubt a dissenting voice on “the science” is ever heard in their deliberations. As can be seen, climate scientists are very much in the minority. It seems that a mix of economists, social scientists, engineers, NGO’s and corporations in receipt of government funding, form the main strength of these particular committees.

I doubt a dissenting voice on "the science" would ever be heard no matter how many climate scientists you added (Ambler has tried to argue against the existence of the consensus, but not too successfully.) Nevertheless, at first glance, it might seem common sense that climate change panels ought to be populated entirely by climate scientists, until you realise that climate science only identifies the existence of the problem. Climate science says nothing about the humanitarian, economic, or even environmental effects of climate change, and it certainly does not say what we might do, as a society, to prevent or mitigate them. This is not a problem with climate science - it simply reflects the cross-disciplinary nature of climate change.

Climate change denialism does not appear to recognise the distinction between all these facets. It does not accept, for instance, that someone can be qualified to talk about reducing CO₂ emissions unless they can also convincingly explain the data used to establish the effects of CO₂ in the first place. To an armchair "sceptic", these two discussions belong in the same discipline. Except they don't. There is a very good reason why the Stern and Garnaut Reviews, for instance, were written by economists rather than climate scientists. Modeling economic costs just isn't part of climate science; the issue transcends disciplines.

In setting out to undermine all work on climate change**, climate denialists become Jacks of all trades and masters of none. They perceive the entire concept of climate change as being the domain of a single discipline (climate science), because they don't realise the depth of analysis that underlies each part of that picture. Analysing the effects of greenhouse gases on temperature could be a life's work, for instance. Analysing the effects of temperature increases on agricultural practices is another life's work, as is modelling the economic costs and benefits of reducing CO₂ emissions, and so on. The true experts each spend their time on a relatively small part of the problem, but paying enormous attention to detail. They rely on other experts to fill in the gaps where needed, because no single person can be an expert in everything. Meanwhile, denialists skip lazily across the entire scope of the problem and engage only in shallow commentary and nitpicking. It would be difficult to comprehend just how many different disciplines are crossed when you naïvely believe that you (and/or those you follow) possess the entire range of necessary expertise.

Thus, the many genuine scientific, humanitarian, political and economic debates regarding climate change are, in denialist circles, mashed crudely into just one big issue, adjudicated solely by climate scientists (except for all the ones who write those terrible papers about hockey stick graphs; they don't count).

Just for fun, let's examine the scientific credentials of some SPPI contributors, starting with Dennis Ambler himself. Ambler puts his name to 14 of the last 100 articles (at the time of writing), and thus appears to be the most prolific recent contributor to the SPPI collection. However, try as I might, I cannot find any biographical information on the man at all. Even SPPI's own Personnel page neglects to mention him. There are no details of his history, qualifications, accomplishments, collaborations, involvements with other organisations, or even interests. "Dennis Ambler" might as well be a pseudonym for all I can tell.***

Next in line is Christopher Monckton, named as the author of 10 of the last 100 articles. Fortunately he is mentioned in the Personnel page, as being an expert on virtually everything, despite not possessing any qualifications at all on anything remotely resembling science or economics. It's worth a read.

Then there's Ross McKitrick, with 4 out of 100 articles. He's an economist, which I hope doesn't put him offside with Ambler.

The remaining articles were contributed by a slew of authors with (I presume) only a tangential relationship to SPPI itself. I won't discuss them, except to note that the current President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus is among them. Doubtless he too specialises in climate science. It's all about expertise, you understand.

** Climate denialism, in aggregate form, opposes every facet of the science on climate change - virtually every finding of every paper - which would be quite a remarkable occurrence if we held it to be intellectually honest. Individuals may accept certain parts of the science to varying extents, and often claim that "nobody" seriously disputes those parts (e.g. that the Earth is currently warming), but in reality every single detail is disputed in some corner or other. (The only exceptions to this are the occasional papers written by denialist champions like Steve McIntyre.)

*** To be fair, it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that all this information is a pre-requisite for making public comments. However, I'm just a pseudo-anonymous blogger, while Dennis Ambler is backed by an "Institute", conferring a facade of expert credibility.

The Science and Public Policy Institute certainly does provide a lot of hilariously twisted commentary on climate change.

Two years ago (January 2009), Doran and Zimmerman (D&Z) published a paper based on Zimmerman's masters thesis. Unsurprisingly, they found that the vast majority (97%) of climate scientists think climate change is real and human-induced. This kind of thing really, really irritates climate change denialists, and so we have Dennis Ambler from SPPI launching into a blisteringly woeful attack on the survey.

He sets the tone with this:

[The survey] was roundly de-bunked at the time by several commentators and it would have been forgotten and consigned to its proper place in the dustbin, if it hadn't been continually

quoted by activists as fact.

If you're going to claim that a paper has been "roundly debunked", a little elaboration would not go astray. Some of us might just be curious about just what arguments were put forth, and you're not giving us much to go on. Also, if we're going to lend it such credence, I would expect some sort of expertise to be involved in this debunking, not just a vague reference to unspecified "commentators".

He then bemoans the surveying of experts as a means of assessing scientific opinion:

This is not arcane knowledge for the select priesthood, this is science and we can read scientific papers and apply quality judgements to them, whether we be specialists or not.

No, Ambler, you really can't. I know this for two reasons:

The remainder of Ambler's article demonstrates his unique inability to "read scientific papers and apply quality judgments". I say "unique" because D&Z's paper is actually quite short and accessible. Given a modicum of education and common sense, there really isn't much of an excuse for not understanding it.

Is there some significance to the 5% figure? The survey was a broad look at the opinions of Earth scientists. Climate scientists just form an important subset of that population, and it's hardly the fault of the authors or anyone else if the proportion happens to be 5%.

Moreover, Ambler knows he can estimate the number of respondents from each country, but he seems not to understand that the very same mathematical device is the reason you don't need to ask everyone in the world. So long as you have a representative sample (and consulting a database of Earth scientists, as D&Z did, would seem to be perfectly acceptable), you can generalise your findings. If 97% of your sample believes X, and your sample is representative of a given group (e.g. climate scientists), then you infer that about  97% of the overall group believes X as well. This is the entire basis of surveys. If this statistical logic did not hold, surveys would not exist.

Why so few non-American climate scientists? That's just a result of the database used by D&Z, coming as it did from the American Geological Institute. There's no reason to think that American and non-American climate scientists are likely to have any specific, major points of professional disagreement, so this shouldn't be a problem.

It's probably about time I had something to say on matters unrelated to the Australian political situation. Which brings me to my other, recently neglected pet blogging topic - climate change.

I came to hear of the 10:10 campaign and Richard Curtis's "No Pressure" short film via Deltoid, The Guardian and Climate Progress. I'm not sure whether I'd recommend watching the video yourself. Suffice it to say, it's rather more gory than you would expect of a climate change action campaign. The reaction to the film was rather negative, and 10:10 has withdrawn the video (though of course it's still available on YouTube).

I fancy there's something of an overreaction going on, though. Once you accept that the gore is merely an appeal to a particular dark sense of humour - which it was - the only things you can really complain about are (a) that it's not really that funny, and (b) that other people may mis-interpret it.

First, not being funny is not an especially heinous crime. I am frequently guilty of it, I'm sure, and yet I remain a free man.

Second, the people who will mis-interpret it are precisely those who were least likely to get the message in the first place. This is what Julian Morrow termed the "secondary audience", in his 2009 Andrew Olle Media Lecture:

The secondary audience come to access controversial content because it's controversial. The secondary audience often tends to be the very opposite of the target audience.

Morrow went on to discuss The Chaser's "Make a Realistic Wish" sketch, which itself caused great rumblings of discontent. That controversy parallels the "No Pressure" controversy to an extent (though you might argue that the stakes are higher in climate change). Morrow elaborates on secondary audiences:

I don't believe there's any convincing evidence, or even a theory, that taking steps to try and placate the secondary audience is prudent, or can be effective. I tend to think it only fuels the fire. But I recognise that's just as hard, probably impossible, to prove too.

His point is important. We can't (necessarily) keep worrying about what the secondary audience will think. Almost by definition, the secondary audience is reactionary and less open-minded than the primary audience. Moreover, I worry about  sentiments like that expressed at Climate Progress:

The video is beyond tasteless and should be widely condemned. … None of this excuses that disgusting video.

It's fine to (a) be personally shocked and other assorted adjectives, and (b) suggest that the film was a tactical error. But let's not run off the rails. At worst, the film was an honest but misguided attempt at encouraging action on climate change. To say that it's "beyond tasteless" beckons imagery of something much worse. It was merely tasteless, not beyond tasteless. To say that it "should be widely condemned" seems to invite blind outrage, and rather ignores the fact that it did, after all, have good intentions. This feels like a comment motivated by fear of those who might retaliate against you, not an honest assessment of the situation.

And I worry that it does merely fuel the fire, as Morrow speculates. It may simply add to the film's notoriety and advertise it's potential as a propaganda weapon for the denialists. One needlessly apologetic or appeasing remark and you may find yourself being held up as evidence of dissent, or even on a list of people who apparently oppose the AGW scientific consensus. I realise that denialists of all stripes can and do take perfectly reasonable and innocent remarks out of context whatever happens, but let's not provide them with the material if we can help it.

This is what they're after, I think. I am reminded of another story that did the rounds in the US several years ago. One Professor John Daly was widely reported as having advocated that "soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors". This was immediately held up as evidence of the evils of liberalism. I recall an Internet forum discussion in which "the left" was challenged to condemn this professor. Fine, you might say, let's condemn him. Ah, but not so fast there. If you do a bit of background reading, you'll discover that Daly was expressing this sentiment in a private email (and was taken somewhat out of context). It was only brought into the public sphere by people looking to generate controversy. By being part of the condemnation roll call, you wouldn't be saving face for "the left", but rather legitimising a manufactured issue, and also legitimising the notion of collective responsibility for the actions of an individual.

So it is with the "No Pressure" film. Surely it isn't too hard, when/if confronted, to argue simply and truthfully that the film was targeted at a "different", "alternative", etc. sense of humour. We shouldn't be required to condemn it, nor take responsibility for it. Nobody was actually hurt (I assume). Frankly, if anyone was offended at the idea of being singled out for not feeling the need to take action on climate change, that's their problem. We're not talking about racial or sexual discrimination, but about the common good. At some point, your beliefs do become the business of everyone else. You almost certainly won't like it, but neither will the rest of us like the idea of pulling our weight when you aren't (simply because you don't want to).

I shall quote Morrow again to conclude:

If you were just offended, unlike those who've been hurt, I don't believe you're owed an apology. You can demand one. And it's possible that some people will say sorry to you - some for noble reasons, some for cowardly ones, some just to get you to shut up.