Irresponsible Skepticism

This past week has seen a buzz in the blogosphere about documents concerning The Heartland Institute.  DeSmogBlog was the first to report on the documents and you can see their posts here, here, here, here, and here.  Further commentary can be found on other websites here, here, here, and here.

See full image at Skeptical Science

The contents of the email from Heartland are now being refered to as Denialgate.  The released brought a response the those victimized by Climategate.  Their response was published in The Guardian and can be found here.

In a previous post I discussed a series on climate ethics that Dr. Donald Brown has been posting on his blog by the same name.  The timing of this series seems ironic in that the Heartland documents go to the point of his discussion about the climate change disinformation campaign.

The Heartland Institute is just one of many "think" tanks that is really an advocacy group, not a scientific organization.  It is not involved in research and publication in any peer-reviewed journal.  It has been criticized in the science journals Nature and Science.  The documents indicate that they have received funding from the fossil-fuel and tobacco industry amongst others.

Climate Change & Ethics

I have been thinking about this post since Donald Brown, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University, wrote a blogpost entitled "An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?"  He outlined the campaign against climate science and went on to write "We are not trying to limit free speech but encourage people to see that lying or misinformation is deeply ethically problematic particularly in cases when deception can lead to immense harm."

I will be the first to admit that I have not consider the ethical implications of man-made climate change or the tactics used to attack the science.   I have been more concerned about the science and challenging those spreading science myths and disinformation.  Considering ethics seemed more of an academic exercise and one that most would find hard to understand.

Granted, I am taking a risk in exploring this issue.  Therefore, I started with an easy question; what is ethics?  I looked at several dictionary responses, but I didn't get much information from them on ethics.  Turned out that the answer was not easy or succinct.