Jonathan Rowson has a golden collection of academic qualifications, having got himself a first class honours in PPE, spent a year at Harvard and got a PhD from Bristol. Oh yes, and he's a chess grandmaster.
I'm not sure he isn't a bit slow on the uptake though.
The Climate Change Collaboration, an alliance of Sainsbury family charities have just paid Rowson to produce a sceptic-bashing report under the banner of the Royal Society of Arts. Seeing another formerly distinguished academy dancing to the green tune is fascinating, particularly when the financial reward for doing so is so obvious, but when you see the tone of the report it is more interesting still. This is in essence an extended exercise in name-calling, with "denier" and its variants appearing hundreds of times. What we have then is green charities paying an education charity to spew venom at people who disagree with them.
You get the impression that the money has been pocketed and the report prepared with a minimum of effort:
‘Denialism’ is more assertive, involving campaigns of misinformation seeking to misdirect people’s attention from the truth with means and methods documented in Oreskes and Conway’s classic work Merchants of Doubt and in modern Britain, propounded by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Given that Lawson and Peiser have said repeatedly that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the denier tag simply will not wash. Did Rowson even bother to look at their pronouncements before writing this sentence? It doesn't look as if he felt his paymasters would be bothered at the lack of some support for such a critical remark or even if it were true. This tells us a great deal the intellectual and ethical standards at the RSA and at the Sainsbury charities.
Rowson, like so many of people who venture into the climate debate from the social science side are unashamedly ignorant about what the climate debate is about. It doesn't matter how many articles you write about climate sensitivity, with all that implies; to the Rowson's of this world you are a denier. This failure to engage with the actual arguments made suggests a highly developed sense of intellectual cowardice or the kind of casual dishonesty that we see so often from greens.
I fancy it's the former. The whole thing is intellectually vapid and so far removed from the reality of the climate debate as to suggest the author simply had nothing better to do with his time.