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Skeptics Would Like Media To Stop Calling Science Deniers 'Skeptics'
Layzej writes: Prominent scientists, science communicators, and skeptic activists, are calling on the news media to stop using the word "skeptic" when referring to those who refuse to accept the reality of climate change, and instead refer to them by what they really are: science deniers. "Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry."
And hackers would like the media to stop calling computer criminals hackers.
Funny, because the science that I learned about in college was ALL ABOUT being constantly questioned.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
And I want all journalists to stop adding a -gate suffix to political scandals! Also, Santa, I would like...
And then we can call AGW proponents the Church of Global Warming. I'm sure people agree far more when name calling is involved.
...and burn them at the stake as witches? That aught to take care of those pesky people who disagree.
Because scientific theories have always been infallible, haven't they?
Oh, Science, please go back to the lab and transmute some gold or something.
Sent from my ENIAC
By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.
How can people who perpetrate misnomers have the nerve to call themselves "journalists"?
First, pointing a finger and screeching 'DENIER' seems a lot like pointing the finger and screeching 'HERETIC', lending credence to the whole environmentalism-as-a-substitute-religion theory.
Beyond that, these scientists might find more traction for their beliefs if they could get away from the folks who are peddling 'solutions' for AGW. You know, the activists who want to make energy so expensive that poor people will have to live in dark, cold homes, and gasoline so expensive that they have to stay in those cold, dark homes.
I imagine, however, that any activist or scientist advocating the use of 'denier/(heritic)' has substituted Gaia for God, and would be very happy to burn their opponents at the stake.
As for me, I'm not qualified to analyze the science. Instead, I'll consider the matter when the people who say it's a problem act like it's a problem. Until their personal conduct matches their words- buying carbon credits ('indulgences') doesn't count- then it's just a continuation of prior climate panics.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
When you actually look at the science itself, it's pretty clear. And nowhere near what the proponents claim.
For that matter, when you look at the history of AGW catastrophism, you see a lot of, well, denial. By the people whose predictions failed miserably.
So far we have NOT seen an increase in the number and size of hurricanes. We have also NOT seen an increase in droughts, an increase in tornado numbers or strength, a decrease in winter snow, or a number of other things. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of events that were predicted as part of CAGW that have not happened (and in many cases, the reverse has come to pass).
We still have a fairly icy polar ice cap (the "sciency" prediction from just a few years back was that it would effectively be gone by now).
We're also about 0.1 C below the low-end value of over 95% of predictions for global temperatures (and 0.5 C below the "most probable" number). That in itself invalidates CAGW as a scientific theory.
Yes, the Earth has warmed. Yes, some of it has been due to CO2 increases by humans.
But the amount - and the results - are both badly blown predictions. That means that the followers of CAGW are, by and large, denying science because it didn't give them the result they wanted.
Funny, because the science that I learned about in college was ALL ABOUT being constantly questioned.
Exactly.
A skeptic will ask questions, and will pay attention to the answers, open to the possibility of their views being changed by evidence. That's science.
A denier will pretend to ask questions, but with no real interest in the answers: their opinions are already set, and won't be changed. That's not science.
Deniers pretend to be skeptics. However, they are actually exactly the opposite: the distinguishing feature of deniers is not skepticism, but credulity-- they seen to credit pretty much anything they hear (or read on a blog somewhere)-- if it supports their pre-existing opinions.
(Amusingly, Fred Singer wrote an article making that exact point: "Deniers are giving us skeptics a bad name.")
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They dont account for the sun?
Son, that the was among the first things they looked at.
And theyve looked at it several times since.
It's not the sun, son.
If it was the sun, we would be cooling right now.
The 11yr cycle bit is also misleading: there is some periodicity, but there is a lot of noise in that signal, as shown in this graph (which also conventiently shows that temperatures, and solar output have been moving in opposite directions for the past 35 years): http://www.skepticalscience.co...
From: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The term Cracker is much more descriptive, draws a distinction between the two but, just never seemed to catch the ear of the media darlings the put on the news.
The problem is that the term " cracker " is already well established in use, a derogatory term referring to white people from the rural south.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This will backfire. The idiots driving this would associate dissent on climate change predictions with folks who reject the historical fact of the Holocaust, the only other place where the term "deniers" is routinely used.
You can't have a brain in your head and seriously think that the modern climate change predictions have a comparable level of certainty to the historical fact of the holocaust. This sort of gross overreach is obvious even to mere mortals who can't readily follow the scientific arguments for or against global warming. It makes the speaker, and every other claim he makes, suspect.
The media has done climate change scientists a great favor by labeling the folks who still challenge the predictions as "skeptics." That word carries connotations of government conspiracy and alien abductions. It's a gift.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I'll trade the label of 'skeptic' for 'science denier' sure, but I'd ask that people stop using the blanket term 'climate change' when they really mean 'a host of sweeping economic, societal, and governmental changes that spend $billions and $trillions to effect what we optimistically expect to be trivial changes in a dynamic system that we mostly don't really understand and have been unable to reliably predict, and which only coincidentally SEEM to conform to a leftist agenda that otherwise nobody was listening to'.
That'd be great, thanks!
-Styopa
Can you simultaneously accept X while questioning X? Seems illogical.
Of course you can. Terms for this in the science community include "working hypothesis" and "the best current model" and phrases such as "subject to further analysis, we currently believe..."
Skeptical has synonyms such as :distrustfull, suspicious, unconvinced. These would all describe a person who is either a "denier" or a skeptic.
No. Deniers have made up their minds already; they are not "unconvinced" at all: they are firm believers. That's the difference between a denier and a skeptic.
So then what you are saying in reality is that anyone not accepting your way of thinking is a "denier" and that "You are either with us, or you are against us!"
No. Deniers have made up their minds already; they are not "unconvinced" at all. That's the difference between a denier and a skeptic: a skeptic can be convinced by evidence.
Established science can and has been and should be questioned as that is how we advance scientific knowledge and processes
There is a difference between paying attention to the science and denying the science. That difference is the difference between a skeptic and a denier.
When you start with the conclusion that the science is wrong because you don't like it-- you're not a skeptic.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I suppose I'm a global warming denier, by the common standard here on Slashdot. The global warming alarmists and pitchmen said "San Francisco will be underwater by 2010". Unfortunately, it's still there.
That's one of two big problems for the global warming camp. Well-known leaders of that movement have publicly admitted to organized, widespread lying and intentional exaggeration in order to "spur the public to action". I deny that they've been telling the truth, and they agree! Has the "science" gotten any better? Well, we know that a typical volcano releases a couple tons of CO2 each day. A few months ago, there was an "OMG Global Warming!" story here on Slashdot that reported atmospheric CO2 levels rising more than expected - based on measuring CO2 on a friggin a volcano! Which is kind of like reporting global average humidity based on moisture measurements taken below Niagra Falls.
There IS some good science supporting global warming, but the alarmist stuff makes better headlines, so 90% of the "science" reported is complete junk, obviously so. I reject all claims based on this utter junk pseudo-science.
The second problem is more recent. Every president has their slush fund, a federal program or two which they use to send tax money to their donors, who send some back as campaign donations. It just so happens that THIS president's slush funds are included in the $100 billion we're spending on "green". For example, the tax payers loaned over a half a billion dollars to Fisker to develop their electric car. Fisker turned right around and handed millions of it to Obama and other Democrats. There's nothing new about that, of course, other than the exchange of greenbacks is normally labeled "green energy" right now. That makes anything labeled "green energy" or "save the planet" inherently suspicious, just like Haliburton contracts were suspicious when Cheney was in the White House. We know that any proposal to spend "half a billion for green energy" means $10 million for the DNC, $10 million for Hillary's campaign, $10 million split between a few congress-critters, $50 million for their CEO friend's golden parachute, and $420 million to who-knows-where. Again, not new - Haliburton was the same. "Green" is the new "Haliburton".
This is a pretty good illustration of being a denier rather than a sceptic:
The problem with the notion of "science denier" is that is entirely too close in concept to "heretic". The AGW advocates are entirely religious in their zeal, and their religious belief is that the End Is Near, and We Must All Repent!
Straw man. The discussion is scientific, not religious, and you're distorting what the scientists are saying. If you have scientifically valid objections against the current state of the science you are very welcome to the debate. If you just object because you don't like what the scientists are saying, you're a science denier. Nobody will burn you at any stake, but nobody will take you serious either.
Remember, before Al Gore got into politics and invented his own Church of Warmism, he had flunked out of Divinity School. Being the High Priest of Warming, he has invented his own religion - and every religion has to have heretics.
Shooting the messenger. You may not like Al Gore, but that doesn't mean that his message was wrong.
You're trying to discredit climate change based on emotional arguments, rather than on objective arguments. That makes you a denier rather than a sceptic; exactly what this discussion is about.
They dont account for the sun?
Son, that the was among the first things they looked at.
And theyve looked at it several times since.
It's not the sun, son.
If it was the sun, we would be cooling right now.
The 11yr cycle bit is also misleading: there is some periodicity, but there is a lot of noise in that signal, as shown in this graph (which also conventiently shows that temperatures, and solar output have been moving in opposite directions for the past 35 years): http://www.skepticalscience.co...
From: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
It's the sun. And no, according to the guys who actually study this sort of thing, we're not far enough into the solar minimum to be in an actual cooling phase yet. Give it a couple more years.
No, the CAGW fans didn't look at the sun "first" - and they keep looking everywhere else. I had a climate scientist angrily tell me that "insolation is a constant!" Not according to the astronomers, it isn't.
What's even more fun is that, even if you treat total solar irradiance as a (very wobbly) constant, you have moderate variations in the frequencies of light that make up that "constant." On big variable is the amount of UV light that makes up sunlight - and (again, oddly enough), that variation has a strong match to global warming.
Some of the CAGW folks looked at the number of sunspots (after the skeptics pointed out the Sun as a possible driver) - but that's not the cycle to look for. It's actually a combination of several cycles, and the 11 year cycle is pretty much the least of those.
One more thing: if you're interested in following the ACTUAL debate over CAGW, stay away from skepticalscience. They're deeply dishonest, and have a strong tendency to delete any posts that argue against CAGW in any way.
The science is on the side of AGW. That's it. Challenge all you want, but when you start ignoring study after study and claim they're all wrong or in some sort of conspiracy, you are not engaging in science or skepticism but block-headed cynicism.
Unfortunately, the examples you give are typical examples of denier style of argumentation-- you just throw random stuff out, without even doing a back of the envelope calculation to ask whether what you're talking about is even close to being significant, on the assumption that you can make somebody else can waste their time explaining basic orders of magnitude to you. Basically: do some basic calculation before just randomly saying stuff like "undersea volcanoes! What about undersea volcanoes?"
What is the order of magnitude of the effect you're talking about? How does it compare to the effects driving climate? Has this been looked at by others? What have previous studies concluded?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Overall I like the sentiment of the post made, but it falls apart at the point when it incorrectly defines sharing:
>> "Sharing: Willingly giving a portion of your possessions to another, denying you use or benefit thereof."
You have just redefined sharing for your own purpose. Your argument makes the same mistake it seeks to oppose, loading words for it's own purpose.
Sharing is not so limited in definition. I can "share" my knowledge with my students, and not be deprived of anything myself. In addition, I can share things that don't belong to me with others, although it might be illegal, it's still pretty clearly sharing. In particular, transferring information is definitely "sharing" and is not always illegal. I could be sharing information I created myself, perhaps my own artwork.
Even if your definition is copy pasted a dictionary definition, one particular dictionary definition does not suffice to fully define a word. Dictionaries are extremely simplified definitions written for quick reference. Etymology and semantics of words are much more complex. For example, even by just using other dictionaries I can find that a common definition is "to use or enjoy something jointly".
Specific types of copying can (and do) run afoul of particular laws, so "copyright infringement" meets your definition of it, but sharing simultaneously meets a definition of sharing that is more reasonable and widespread than that which you use. Copying itself, and in general, is not wrong. Whether particular copyright infringement is ethical or not depends on a lot of factors too complex to really get in to here (eg. the legitimacy of the laws in effect, the proper functioning of democracy, the consent of those governed, etc).
There isn't much difference between the two religious camps, except one gets excused by the AGW proponents much more quickly.
One side shouts--LOUDLY-- that scientists are frauds, scientific results are a hoax, anybody paying attention to science is participating a "scam", and there's a worldwide conspiracy of scientists to defraud the public.
The other side doesn't.
I see a very clear difference.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you have data, make a model, and then either make experiment or prediction on model and come with a different result than the actual science, youa re doing science you can PUBLISH and then you are a climate skeptic because you have reason to.
... It can, but with a proper data and evidence. Not with bullshit from a sofa).
Climate change denier, usually the same people which respond to criticism with "hey science is a religion you can't question it" are usually armchar people havign read a blog or two or have a poltical ground and have no fucking clue about the real state of climate science state.
How many people worldwide can be called climate science skeptic ? AKA : publish article and have data model to back it up ? Not many. I can count them maybe on a hand or two. ALL the rest are denier which throw any excuse up and they are present by many many order of magnitude more than the previous group (including the false criticism "established science cannot be questionned"
And this is essentially why your criticism is not warranted. Science is about being constantly questionned by other falsifiable science hypotheses. Not by idiot in a chair repeating some conservative BS they saw somewhere abou solar flare or volcanoe.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org