8cddcedc_Quark_Soup_by_David_Appell__ode_Highlights_HIDE_HIGHLIGHTS
[Time] 37:47
Russ: So, speaking of going mad: You've been harassed quite a bit lately on a personal--by the way, the other part about this that's frustrating is you don't expect academics and scientists or social scientists in the case of economics to be name-callers. And I don't know whether this is an--accepting[?excepting?] to say this is a modern phenomenon. I suspect it's not. I have a feeling that scientists in the 18th century and 19th century were probably--had ad hominem attacks on their opponents as well. Guest: Yes, I think that's true, actually. Russ: It's a strange thing, though, that when you put an idea forward that you are called a bad name rather than having a patient explanation of why you are wrong. My view is that the angrier and ruder my opponents get, that suggests that I'm doing okay. Because if it weren't getting under their skin, that you'd just say, that's wrong and here's why, and it would be black and white, open and shut. And it's not. And that's part of the problem. But you've been under some attacks lately. So, what has happened, and what's that been like? Guest: Uh, yes. Well, just to illustrate your point, there's an old saying that when you are taking flak, you know you are over the target zone. Russ: There you go. Guest: But, I took a lot of personal attacks. People attacked my motives. And it's true that I have got personal investments in coal mining near my home; in fact, my family has been in it one way or another for a couple of hundred years. So, maybe I have a vested interest in carbon dioxide emissions. But I've always declared that; I've always made that very explicit. Russ: You owned that coal when you were worried about global warming. Guest: Well, exactly. That's right. Russ: Kind of gives you a [?]. Guest: [?] It's held me back. I've thought--I better not, I must be being influenced by my own vested interests here, so I'd better be careful. So, for a long time I hesitated before expressing my skepticism, for that reason. But, anyway: I was attacked for that. But extraordinary attacks. I mean, really bizarre attacks would come at me. Very personal, very rude. Often of the nature of this strange sort of fact-checking which doesn't check facts. Which says, 'His article is full of errors' and then doesn't actually give any example of anything that's an error. They might say, 'He said x but he didn't say y.' Well, that's not an error. It's an omission, but it's not an error. Or something like that. So, often--it got nastier and nastier. The more I put my head over the parapet of this. And eventually I wrote an article for the Times in London saying, 'Why is it? My views on this are pretty mild, actually. I'm a lukewarmer. I'm not a skeptic. Why are the attacks so nasty? Why do some of my colleagues in the House of Lords resort to impugning the quality of my Ph.D. thesis, which was on the behavior of birds 35 years ago.' Russ: I found that very entertaining. You wrote about that; I followed up and looked into it. It's amazing. Guest: But having--by the way, I'm sure the were mistakes in my thesis. But the very man who impugned me had been my thesis examiner and said it's a very good thesis. Russ: Yeah; that's awkward. It's very awkward. Guest: Anyway, I really wrote this up as a sort of entertaining story: This is what happens if you step into this arena. You get a lot of mud thrown at you. And I was really trying to be quite light-hearted and say this happens and it's where the world is. I wasn't trying to play the victim card or anything like that. Anyway, the reaction to this article was another of these pieces, in The Guardian dissecting [?] what an evil person I was to have written even this article. And the illustration at the head of this article was the severed head of a zombie. And the implication was that I was a sort of zombie person, whose views were so old-fashioned and so dead that they needed to be cut out. And the article virtually said as much. And then below the article somebody wrote a comment saying 'Shouldn't that be Matt Ridley's head in the picture?' And somebody else said, 'Isn't that going a bit far?' And he said, 'No, I think we should do this kind of thing.' This was the day that the Japanese hostage was beheaded in Syria. And then somebody else put a comment saying, 'The man who just made these two comments about Matt Ridley being beheaded is actually, although he is using a pseudonym, Jack Golgariev[?], and so occasionally he writes for The Guardian. He shouldn't be doing this. He's not just an ordinary Internet troll. That comment, was then removed by the editors. But not the comments recommending that I be beheaded. At which point, someone drew this to my attention, and I wrote a letter to the Editor of The Guardian saying that: 'Excuse me, this is technically hate speech and death threats, and I'm not going to give it to the police but I really do think you ought to do something about that.' And at that point they did intervene and remove these threats. But it took me three weeks to apologize for this. Now, I'm not, again, I'm not claiming that my safety was genuinely threatened here. But I am claiming that that goes too far. That, like, come on. All I'm saying is we think we may be spending too much money enriching wind farm tycoons and too little money reducing poverty with fossil fuels at the moment, because I don't think climate change is going to be as dangerous in 100 years' time as you think. I might be wrong in that. I might feel guilty in having that view in 50 years' time, as the weather heats up rapidly. But I don't think it's illegitimate for me to make that argument. And I certainly don't think it requires threats to cut my head off.
Quark Soup by David Appell
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