Reporter David Rose has revealed how he has been subjected to "vile online abuse" because he questioned the severity of man-made global warming.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Rose said that a commenter on The Guardian website suggested his children murder him.
The commenter said: “In a few years, self-defence is going to be made a valid defence for parricde, so Rose’s children will have this defence to present in their defence at the trial.”
Rose said that last week on Twitter a commenter wrote that they knew where he lived and posted his personal telephone numbers.
He said that, as someone who is Jewish, he particularly objects to being called a climate change-denier (with its connotations to the terms Holocaust-denier). And he said that another Guardian website commenter compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Rose said that he does believe the Earth’s climate is warming due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions, but said: “I also think the imminence of the threat posed by global warming has been exaggerated”. And he said that he thinks current “renewable” energy sources are “ruinously expensive and totally futile”.
Rose noted that another Guardian blog post criticising Matt Ridley of The Times for his similarly sceptical view on climate change was illustrated with a picture of a prosthetic severed zombie head (the sub headline for the piece read: 'Ridley argues against climate action because he believes zombie myths').
That picture has now been changed because “readers found it offensive”.
One commenter to the piece said: “Should that not be Ridley’s severed head in the photo…Ask yourself a simple question: Would the world be a better place without Matt Ridley?”
Rob Ward, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, described Rose’s piece on Twitter as: “Hilarious self-pitying nonsense”.
Rose responded: "Such behaviour is deplorable and I condemn it. Unlike you, I wouldn't consider any complaint about vile online abuse 'hilarious'."
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