Hilary:

Richard, IMHO, this latest hobby-horse you seem to have mounted is really stretching far beyond "freedom of expression and debate".

Please provide your definition of hobby-horse. I wanted to float some ideas and I began in a provocative manner. I don't yet apologise for either. Your loaded language in response is typical, both of you and of others who wish to close down the debate I've begun. In precisely what sense is this a hobby-horse and, just for the record, what were my last three? After receiving your answer I might consider what else you write.

Barry (Mar 2, 2014 at 4:17 PM): I didn't know you smoked dope. It's a little ironic. Your "self indulgent" is that wide of the mark. If you're willing to retract it I may consider your suggestion to post some (not all) of the rest of my thoughts on this elsewhere. (I don't have a blog that people can comment on right now but there are various ways to get round that.)

Mostly, however, I agree with Jiminy and stewgreen. TinyCO2 also made an excellent contribution but revealed a horribly wrong assumption within it:

Sceptics share very few similarities with those who have been persecuted in the past. Very few.

Totally agree. What I'd written about Michael Mann was:

… Mann's bad science has not been directly lethal to his fellow human beings …

Not directly is the key phrase there. I suggest we could all do with re-reading Roy Spencer, on whom a lot of my own reflections and questions are based:

Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist. They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty. And if there is a historically demonstrable threat to humanity, it is poverty.

The victims are not well-fed sceptics in the West but they number in the millions. What kind of language does justice to that situation, without adding further insult to the massive injuries of the Holocaust? As well as registering in the strongest terms our horror at the casual defamation (and insult to the memory of the real victims of the Shoah) implicit in the label denier. That's what I wanted to explore here.

I draw people's attention to the brilliant new WUWT thread The silence of the Anti Defamation League suggests they endorse defamation of climate skeptics, which includes a sobering list of 'the great and the good' making explicit comparison between climate scepticism and Holocaust denial. My own contribution agrees with Mark Bofill that

Rhetoric like that is the way mobs work themselves up to lynchings and other atrocities.

But let's take extreme care to distinguish between likely future effects of such language, however disgusting, and what has already happened. As TinyCO2 has rightly implied, so far we have bundles to be grateful for and are in nothing like the terrible predicament of the Jews and Gypsies in the years 1941-1945. The leadership Anthony Watts, Roy Spencer and others are giving on this makes it much less likely that we will be victims in a similar way. Yet each day we live in comfort the world's poorest succumb to the extra pressures brought on by biofuel subsidies and ignorant, CO2-obsessed energy policies. Spencer's balance in covering this latter point makes his a particularly important contribution in my view.

So no explanation of 'hobby-horse' or apology for it? By all means count yourself out. I certainly do.

I wrote two highly positive things about you on your blog a week ago but your strange fantasies about me did not allow you to say one positive thing in return and now your input here is contaminated by ridiculous and pathetic insults.

Let's just accept that I am the devil to you. I once told you that you were too wordy. I'm sometimes blunt like that. This may have destroyed your self-esteem and/or all good feelings for me. I have no solution for that.

But, just in case you are wrong about me, please bow out of this conversation. There are important things at stake here, as you of all people should understand. Please allow those of us willing to talk about it in this particular place to do so. There are plenty of others you are welcomed and appreciated.

I want to return to my initial post and suggest one reason that it is so shocking, in the words of John Gray, the UK political philosopher:

“I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.

“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.”

Too often, in my view, lofty discussions about those who 'deny the science' do not face up to what science itself has done in very recent history. Even the frequent, definite and deliberate comparison of sceptics with holocaust deniers (as shown by WUWT yesterday) takes it for granted that the 'good people' know everything that the Holocaust contained. But this in my experience is far from true.

It is therefore a shock to be reminded not just of the horrors of the period but of the central role played by scientists, harbingers of progress in the dreams of the Enlightenment, within it. Working for commercial brands that are still well-known today. (Happily we know these companies paid generous compensation to the victims since. Or do we in fact know nothing about this? The record has in my view been abysmal.)

I chose one of the milder examples in the book but I wanted our discussion to be grounded in sickening reality. This is what we are being accused of denying - well, of denying something that is equally bad and equally certain. I wanted to drive home just how terrible that accusation against sceptics is.

That I know is not true - as you would if you'd had the guts to meet me when that was suggested some months ago. What is true is what I wrote yesterday:

I wanted to float some ideas and I began in a provocative manner. I don't yet apologise for either.

Notice the 'yet'. I still haven't given my reasons for asking question two or my answers to the subsequent questions. Once those are down in virtual print - possibly tonight - I will be intensely interested in the reactions, questions and criticisms of all comers.

Those who pronounced their verdict having only read the questions I thought made themselves look stupid. Perhaps I too will look stupid at the end. But as Ghandi said

One must become as humble as the dust before he can discover truth.

Nowhere is this more true than the Holocaust, which the rhetoric of alarmists has made front and centre of the global warming debate.