Matt Ridley: Never experienced anything like this — the climate debate ‘blackening’

Matt Ridley is about as gentlemanly, polite and sane a man as you’ve ever likely to meet — which is exactly why the (climate) mob are so afraid of letting him speak.

Ridley even agrees that humans have caused most of the warming in the last fifty years (I shall have to talk to him about that). But this middle position is a potent threat. He’s walking the very ground that threatens the Green Blob — there are no subsidy trains in the middle land.

There’s no urgency, no gravy, and yet it’s so temptingly sensible, which is why the minions work hard to silence him. He can’t be ignored as “fringe”:

The National Review — Julie Kelly:

While most reasonable people would agree with his logical and hopeful approach to potential global catastrophe, the irrational pessimists leading the international climate-change crusade consider it heresy.

Many have smeared Viscount Matt Ridley, who is also a Conservative-party member of the House of Lords, as a climate “denier” and targeted him for professional destruction.

“I’ve written about many controversial issues during my career,” Ridley said. “Never, have I ever experienced anything like what happens when you write about climate, which is a systematic and organized attempt to blacken your name rather than your arguments and to try to pressure any outlet that publishes me into not publishing me anymore.”

A group of activists and scientists is urging the Times(U.K.) to stop publishing a regular column authored by Ridley because his views often challenge the climate tribe’s reigning dogma.

Fortunately, none of this seems to have dampened Ridley’s good humor or self-effacing manner. Quite to the contrary: This rational optimist is now talking about the benefits of rising carbon dioxide emissions.

In a speech last year at the Royal Society of London, Ridley presented the evidence on global greening, which is the spread of green vegetation around the world over the past 30 years. It is called the “CO₂ fertilization effect” and is caused by elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

In a normal scientific debate, there would be a normal distribution of opinions — with most minds walking the middle ground where Matt is. It’s only tribal politics and rampant bullying that can keep opinions split in a U-shape distribution with most “players” either completely for or completely against an idea. And this is what Ridley is experiencing.

One of those groups must be wrong. Perhaps both. But the U-shape polarized opinion state takes a lot of effort to maintain. There is high-speed-spin, and buckets of money required to centrifuge the minds out of the middle.

Skeptics are not the ones fighting to silence voices.

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