Climate change ‘deniers’ should no longer have a voice in public debate because basically they are the same as flat-earthers and people who don’t believe that smoking causes cancer.

Or so declares a group of semi-famous green writers, politicians, and scientists in an open letter to The Guardian.

The letter begins:

“We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real.”

This is unintentionally funny: none of the signatories of the letter actually has any credibility.

They used to be quite well known once.

The Honourable Sir Jonathan Porritt Bt, for example, used to advise the Prince of Wales on sustainability issues before selling his soul to work for the palm oil industry.

Caroline Lucas was and is Britain’s only Green MP, though people are now starting to weary of her strident watermelon posturings.

George Monbiot used to be the Guardian‘s environmental disaster guru till everyone realised that, as with Chicken Licken and the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, his doomy prognostications have to be taken with a pinch of salt the size of Lake Assal.

Jonathan Bartley is “co-leader” of a party — the Greens — so away with the fairies it recently almost recruited as its deputy leader a transgender activist whose election agent father had tortured and raped a 10-year-old girl in his family attic.

And so the list goes on: activist scientists clinging by their fingernails to their grant-funding which depends on “climate change” being a thing in a world where increasingly, obviously it’s not a thing; Members of the European Parliament soon — we hope — to lose their pointless jobs; employees of Greenpeace, whose business model is pretty much built on environmentalist scaremongering; plus, to swell the list at the bottom, a dozen or so names so utterly obscure not even their mothers have heard of them.

These are the people now threatening to withdraw their “credibility” from panel discussions on climate change should any sceptical voices be invited to give the debate some semblance of balance.

Gosh: just how are we going to manage if we never hear their pontifications again?

What’s clear from the letter is that they have nothing to say that they haven’t all said a gazillion times already. That is, they are not offering any convincing new arguments to back their increasingly threadbare theory that the planet is warming at dangerous and unprecedented levels because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. All they are giving us are they usual paranoid conspiracy theories about fossil-fuel-funded lobbyists…

Balance implies equal weight. But this then creates a false equivalence between an overwhelming scientific consensus and a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply to sow doubt to serve those interests. Yes, of course scientific consensus should be open to challenge – but with better science, not with spin and nonsense. We urgently need to move the debate on to how we address the causes and effects of dangerous climate change – because that’s where common sense demands our attention and efforts should be.

…And the usual ad hom insults which demand we believe that eminent sceptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer have no more credibility than people who think that the earth is flat:

Fringe voices will protest about “free speech”. No one should prevent them from expressing their views, whether held cynically or misguidedly. However, no one is obliged to provide them with a platform, much less to appear alongside them to give the misleading impression that there is something substantive to debate. When there is an article on smoking, newspapers and broadcasters no longer include lobbyists claiming there are no links to cancer. When there’s a round-the-world yacht race we don’t hear flat-earthers given airtime: “This is madness; they’ll sail off the edge!”

Josh the cartoonist captures perfectly the absurdity of all this:

New cartoon: riposte to hilarious letter in Graun from intolerant alarmists. https://t.co/p5iTj8gNfI … Even funnier, @Jonathan__Leake says Porrit works for Palm Oil industry clearing forests. https://t.co/iQCkXzCYY5 … H/t @aDissentient for helpful edits pic.twitter.com/PzgGbGFSiE — Josh (@Cartoonsbyjosh) August 27, 2018

So too does Tony Heller with this post recalling some of the numerous occasions when journalists have got it completely wrong about climate change: predicting droughts — and almost immediately being inundated with floods; warning of Siberian cold only to be confronted by near-record heat; and so on.

No prizes for guessing which newspaper it was responsible for this fake climate news drivel.

Why, it was The Guardian, of course.