My previous post on Nature’s use of “denier” in a recently published paper has triggered a lively comment thread, including this question to me:
Since you obviously object to the usefulness of the term ‘denier’, would you care to comment on its appropriateness after considering Micha Tomkiewicz‘s thoughts?
This is in reference to several provocative blog posts by a Holocaust survivor (and physics professor) who, several months ago, asked:
But what about climate change deniers? Can we really compare the two, the Holocaust and climate change? Does this have anything to do with science?
Shortly after this appeared, I did have some thoughts on the heated debate over the meaning of climate “denier,” and cobbled them together in a post for another site. For reasons that I won’t divulge (it’s complicated), that post never appeared. But now seems like a good time to put it up here:
A frequent lament of climate campaigners is that “disinformation” from contrarians and ideologues opposed to any action on global warming continues to muddy the larger public conversation. The stalled politics (in the U.S. and several other countries) frustrates many who regard climate change as an existential threat to future generations. Much of their ire, rightly or wrongly, is often directed at fossil fuel interests, conservative think tanks, and climate skeptics.
So it’s not surprising that a recent forum at Penn State University was devoted to the climate “disinformation campaign.” The first speaker, Donald Brown, a climate ethicist at Penn State, argued that the last 25 years of potential action have been lost because of deliberate “disinformation” from the aforementioned. The continuation of such tactics led Brown to suggest:
I think we should encourage a conversation whether this is some kind of new crime against humanity. It is really evil stuff. It is nasty.
Predictably, this lit up various precincts of the climate blogosphere. Never mind that Brown was essentially repeating something he’d alreadywritten a few years earlier.
There are others who want to move the climate conversation on to this same highly charged moral terrain. For instance, just weeks after the Penn State forum, Micha Tomkiewicz, a Brooklyn college physics professor, triggered a firestorm after he explicitly associated denial of climate change with denial of the Holocaust. Most (if not all) climate commentators studiously avoid making such a direct comparison. Some shy away from using the “denier” label altogether because of the connotation.
Aside from all considerations regarding Godwin’s Law, the use of the term ‘denier’ is undeniably an unflattering identification of one of the PARTIES to the debate, not one of the ISSUES of the debate. As such any participant who is using the term ‘denier’ in reference to another participant (or group thereof) is confessing to having reached the point of intellectual bankruptcy in the dabate by resorting to ad hominem attacks.
The term “denier” used in the same context as a “Holocaust denier” is a deliberate misuse of the term. The Holocaust is an historical event fully documented with photos, survivors and newsreels. Climate change is a computer model foretelling doom if we do not change our evil fossil-fuel ways. It is not the same thing to deny history as it is to deny prophecy, which is what climate change is. Just because complex computer models that no one shares outside the chosen IPPC circle created the prophecy makes it no less prophecy. One cannot deny an event that has not yet occurred. One cannot deny a connection that is not proven concretely (models saying humans did this are not concrete proof). The term “denier” is nothing more than name-calling and evidence of the lack of knowledge on the part of the user.
“Prophecy” implies an “assisted” vision, witness the Revelation to John. What the IPCC has is nothing more than reading chicken entrails.
Dr. Lindzen once said that he believes the term “denier” to be more accurate of his position than the word “skeptic”. His reasoning was that the carbon dioxide induced warming hypothesis, never had sufficient credibility to be seriously considered with scientific investigation. Scientists are skeptical about rational scientific hypotheses and theories.
I deny that this hypothesis is in any way scientific.
@Rich
I understand your comment, but I would still say that what these people do is “prophecy”. The “assist” comes from computer modeling, which is not a God in the traditional sense, but for politically motivated science, it is omniscient and provides insights that are not available to the average human being. Perhaps it’s a stretch, but many who believe in man-made climate change seem to feel they are endowed with special knowledge that the masses cannot understand. To me, that’s implying “assisted” vision.