If you are paying attention to the latest dust up over climate change then you know that a judgment has been rendered (PDF) by the relevant British authority (OFCOM) on complaints about the airing of a controversial documentary by UK Channel 4 challenging consensus climate science and politics, titled The Great Global Warming Swindle.


The decision has led to a wide range of reactions and commentary (e.g., NYT’s Andy Revkin, Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre, former IPCC chairman Bob Watson, and many, many others). Here I’d like to address several points that have nothing to do with the substance of the complaint or UK laws governing the public media, but rather the broader issues raised by the controversy for the role of scientists in seeking to limit freedom of expression.

First off, it is probably hard for many non-British (and perhaps even some Brits) to make sense of what is actually going on. Here is my take on the situation, and any UK politics/media experts who may be reading are invited to weigh in and correct or clarify. I paid my 2007 BBC License Fee so I am of course eminently qualified to opine;-) UK Channel 4 is a public television station, and as such its programming falls under certain legislative requirements (a “broadcasting code“), which are enforced by an independent regulatory agency called the Office of Communication or OFCOM.

The very fact that there is such an “Office of Communication” with a mandate to regulate the details of non-profane programming content may strike many Americans as somewhat strange. In a U.S. context restricting what can be said on broadcast television, even public television, is limited in practice to the profane or indecent, and even here the threshold is fairly high (judging by what I let my children watch), if consistently Puritan. Just this week a U.S. federal court threw out a complaint of indecency regarding the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake, ahem, Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.”

On the British side there is a much longer history of attention to libel in the form of speech but also to the government role in making citizens aware of risks (, e.g., “Mind the Gap”). Academics have called government role in protecting its citizens the “risk society” following the work of Ulrich Beck, and those criticizing such paternalism, from both the ends of the political spectrum, have disparagingly labeled this role as that of a “nanny state.” In short, the fact that OFCOM is rendering a decision on the content of a documentary (much less its far more discussed decision on the content of the reality show Big Brother) is an idiosyncratically British situation that raises important questions about the role of the government in overseeing what information is allowed to be presented to its citizens, in this case via a publicly owned, but commercially funded television. As such, understanding this debate has less to do with the issue of climate change than it does with British politics, history, and culture.

On the other hand, because many of the complainants are scientists, some not even British, another important perspective on this debate is the role of scientists and other academics in efforts to limit the freedom of expression. Arguably, the global scientific community shares a set of norms on the free exchange of information that, while shaped by each of our national and cultural settings, also transcends those situational factors. For example, the value of peer review in scientific publishing knows no national boundaries and is a broadly shared value in the scientific community. Freedom of expression would also seem to have broad support, whether that expression is in the form of shared environmental data or the opinions of government scientists that differ from their political bosses.

On climate change however, some in the scientific community have departed quite radically from support for freedom of expression. For example, recently NASA’s James Hansen has famously called for trials of those who have provided support for the dissemination of skeptical perspectives on climate change, singling out executives in energy companies. Similarly, Joe Romm, of the Center for American Progress, has called for an editor of a newsletter of the American Physical Society to be fired and his colleagues at the APS to be subject to an email pressure campaign for inviting and publishing an article taking issue with the IPCC consensus. Closer to home, in early 2007, I was told by an official at my own university that some of my academic peers from other institutions had contacted our university administration complaining about the apparently heretical public positions that I had expressed on climate change and warned me to “think of my career” before making such statements in the future. Thankfully, when I complained to a wider circle of administrators this official apologized for the comment (a “misunderstanding,” of course) and other CU officials apparently ignored the complaint. These examples of formal and informal sanctions are all used to try to limit the freedom of expression on the subject of climate change.

Should scientists and other academics be working for restrictions on the freedom of expression on climate change, or perhaps sanctions for those expressing or allowing the expression of certain views?

Let me make my position clear — No.

My views are no doubt shaped (maybe determined) by my cultural upbringing as an American and as an academic, and my inclination as a philosophical pragmatist. Here is what Oliver Wendell Holmes (a famous pragmatist) had to say about free expression (for a review of the history of the First Amendment see Anthony Lewis):

[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

More specific to academia, in 1975 Yale University published a report on freedom of expression (PDF)which was adopted as formal university policy and is often referred to as a authoritative statement in support of freedom of expression. Here is an excerpt of some of its eloquent and forceful prose (emphases added):

The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching. To fulfill this function a free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well. It follows that the university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

We take a chance, as the First Amendment takes a chance, when we commit ourselves to the idea that the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time. The validity of such a belief cannot be demonstrated conclusively. It is a belief of recent historical development, even within universities, one embodied in American constitutional doctrine but not widely shared outside the academic world, and denied in theory and in practice by much of the world most of the time.

On the obligations of academics (and I would argue that the responsibility extends to scientists at research institutions that are not universities, such as government labs), the report states:

We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox. Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts.

If the priority assigned to free expression by the nature of a university is to be maintained in practice, clearly the responsibility for maintaining that priority rests with its members. By voluntarily taking up membership in a university and thereby asserting a claim to its rights and privileges, members also acknowledge the existence of certain obligations upon themselves and their fellows. Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.

It is troubling to see academics and scientists working hard to sanction certain people because of what they say, rather than taking on the arguments on their merits, as frustrating and difficult a task that might seem to be at times. Some might argue that the threat of climate change is so important that we cannot allow certain voices to be heard. The Yale report says of such perspectives:

We have considered the opposing argument that behavior which violates these social and ethical considerations should be made subject to formal sanctions, and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive. Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject both of these arguments. They assert a right to prevent free expression. They rest upon the assumption that speech can be suppressed by anyone who deems it false or offensive. They deny what Justice Holmes termed “freedom for the thought that we hate.” They make the majority, or any willful minority, the arbiters of truth for all. If expression may be prevented, censored or punished, because of its content or because of the motives attributed to those who promote it, then it is no longer free. It will be subordinated to other values that we believe to be of lower priority in a university.

The conclusions we draw, then, are these: even when some members of the university community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities, the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their right to free expression.

So while I don’t really have an informed or relevant position on UK media regulations or even on the substance of the Swindle program, I do feel strongly that the current wave of climate blasphemy that seems to be popular among prominent scientists involved in the climate issue is one day going to be looked back upon as a low point in this debate. Climate change is important, but so too are other values, and freedom of expression is among them.