Thanks, Poirot. Just had a look at the Monbiot link. It's great! When I teach essay writing to my students, I'll use it. What a treasure trove of rhetorical devices! Ad hominen, ad odium, ad metum, ad consequentiam, ad nauseam ... a veritable salad of didactic invective, well dressed with hyperbole and sarcasm ... I LOVE Monbiot's major premise: if you tell nasty people what they want to hear, you must be wrong, while if you tell nice people what THEY want to hear, you're probably right. Now THAT's a novel way to address climate science and its critics! I'm impressed. When someone goes to such extreme length to make sure I DON'T read a book, I'm almost certain to enjoy it. And I did, in fact. Don't agree with everything Ridley says, of course, but he asks some very, very good questions, and his arguments can require a good deal of mental effort to counter. Which is why I like his speech: those who feel obliged to dismiss or denounce his criticisms because it's too hard to refute them ... there's your definition of a 'believer'. Personally, I'd like to hold climate scientists to the highest possible standards, precisely because there IS so much at stake. If that makes me and Ridley 'deniers', so be it.

TAR,

Ridley's "sound arguments", as Squeers asserts, are coloured by his neoliberal leanings.

In "The Rational Optimist" Ridley lambastes government regulation and interference in free (and reckless) marketeering. This after a parliamentary Treasury select committee accused Ridley, as chairman of Northern Rock, of "high-risk, reckless business strategy".

That the media, according to Monbiot, "simply look the other way....{and act as] a massive right-wing echo chamber" is hard to deny.

That m'dear is confirmation bias - something which Ridley and his ilk rely upon for their credibility.

Peter Hume,
I don't and have never discounted "rationality as an intellectual method", I have been justly sceptical about it--and this is after all Ridley's own position here, he just (perhaps) doesn't realise he's caught in its coils himself. As usual, you have nothing to offer but the spittle from the chops of your malice.

Poirot, thanks for the corroborative article.

The Acolyte Rizla,

Well this is disappointing, I had thought that perhaps you were capable of interrogating your confirmation bias (as a matter of fact all but a couple of the posts above are instances of confirmation bias, with no critical examination given to the article at all, just eager confirmation), but all you can do is try to salvage your position by splitting airs with me. The material fact is that Ridley comes from "precisely" the economic, intellectual and aristocratic spectrum I cite above and he has a vested and "logical" interest in protecting. Accordingly his publications do just that!
I accept your apology by default since I don't expect to receive one, as all you can do is cast aspersions and equivocate over trivia in response (the fact that he doesn't inherit the title and the estate till daddy dies. Well I stand corrected on that momentous point!)
It never ceases to amaze me how contradiction is so resented at OLO. That is the modus operandi of science btw; some brave soul proffers a hypothesis and his colleagues set about mercillously destroying it.
I welcome that kind of response. I am grateful to he or she who contradicts and vanquishes any position I take. What is the point in debating our opinions here if it isn't to improve on and transcend them. We are all fallible, and yet we cling to our biases in the teeth of argument, however compelling, as if we were infallible!
If Ridley is serious in his contentions above, then he should interrogate his position more closely. As it is, for me he is either a fool or a hypocrite in writing an article that is so easily turned on himself.

@ Poriot,

<< Talking of confirmation bias....George Monbiot asserts that Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist" is telling the rich and powerful what they want to hear.>>

Talking of confirmation bias... you couldn't find too many better examples than George Monbiot and The Guardian...except, perhaps, those who cite them as credible authorities.

SPQR,

The point I was making to was that Monbiot's article alluded to the very "confirmation bias" that Ridley was talking about. I don't deny that I gravitate to opinions that confirm my bias.
Monbiot was commenting on the (right-wing) media's confirmation bias in their failure to address Ridley's obvious self-interest as a neoliberal pundit and a spokesman for free and unregulated economic rationalism....even though his "rational optimist and neoliberal principled" chairmanship ran a bank into the ground and required a bailout from the very government that he wishes would leave the market to its own devices.

Confirmation bias...the Ridley's of this world are beholden to it and dependent on it - even as they warn against it

Poirot,

Ridley may well have a bias, but it doesn't necessarily follow that his arguments are unsound, and attempting to discredit arguments on the basis of the arguer’s bias is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. An argument's soundness or lack therof is contingent only upon its substance, and not on the arguer's character.

Squeers,

Is this really the best you can do? Continuing with your fallacious argument that Ridley's arguments are soundly rebutted on the grounds that he's a toff? Once again for the hard-of-thinking: the soundness or otherwise of Ridley's arguments are independent of his socio-economic status. There are an awful lot of variables which affect the climate, but I'm pretty damn sure that Dr. Ridley's bank balance isn't one of them.

Might I suggest that refuting the substance of Dr. Ridley's arguments, rather than merely dismissing them out-of-hand on the basis that he is an aristocratic neoliberal, may prove a more persuasive method of argument?