Climate Change and Free Speech

From its beginnings, Quartet saw itself as publishing voices of dissent and radical opinions, believing that these needed to be heard as part of the ongoing democratic debate.

They published people like May Hobbs, who had brought out the night cleaners at the Ministry of Defence on strike with her Cleaners’ Action group, in protest at deplorable work conditions, and Willie Hamilton, whose republican polemic My Queen and I appeared at a time when ‘republicanism’ was a dirty word through the activities of the IRA. They published Des Wilson’s Minority Report: A Diary of Protest 1970-73 and espoused the causes of the world’s underdogs, including the Palestinians. They undertook to publish the first edition of The Joy of Sex when it was still at risk of prosecution; and while the customs seized and destroyed many of its earliest shipments, that was not enough to prevent Quartet from pursuing its right to publish what the establishment objected to at the time.

I would therefore be betraying the principles on which Quartet was founded if I refrained from publishing a book because it represented a minority or alternative view.

Such a book is Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science, Professor Plimer being a dissenting voice on the issue of the causes of climate change.

The irony now is that Quartet has suddenly found itself being bombarded by an orchestrated blizzard of emails from a bunch of protesters who take great objection to the fact that we have published it at all, and seek to run a campaign for the boycott of Quartet Books.

An even richer irony is that this has been stirred by a journalistic clique on the Guardian, a newspaper that claims to fly the flag for liberal freedoms.

The author’s offence is not to accept the doctrine that human activity is responsible for the changes we see in the world’s ecosphere, and to argue his case that they are far more likely to be part of the pattern of cycles of natural change that have taken place throughout the millennia of the planet’s history.

Climate change is an area where there are many shades of opinion and a need for continuing debate. The purpose of this campaign is, however, to gag Professor Plimer’s voice altogether. It bears all the hallmarks of coming from those with fundamentalist beliefs who cannot tolerate any contradictions to their own opinions. They have conveniently put aside any claims to alternative points of view and, while professing to be the guardians of democracy and free speech, are actually bent on destroying those very qualities. It seems like another example where political correctness goes all the way into the ridiculous.

Ian Plimer has always been ready to engage in open debate on the issue, but the result has usually been that his opponents try to bury him under mountains of abuse and insult rather than with reasoned counter-argument. The emails Quartet has been receiving certainly come under this tactic.

Calls from this misguided militant minority to boycott Quartet are not the way forward. Where the issues involved are this important, we are all for civilised debate, and those who think otherwise are not doing their own cause any favours.   

Readers, who are not so locked into dogma, should be free to judge for themselves.