I am way behind on blogging. Facebook microblogging has taken a lot of wind out of my blogging sails.
Joe Romm on denialism. This is one of the fiercest denunciations of denialism I have seen.
Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.
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My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known “skeptics.”… The media — and everyone else — should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity’s self-destruction more likely.
The deniers and delayers, as CP uses the terms, are those who aggressively embrace one or both parts of a two-fold strategy. First, they deny the strong and growing scientific understanding that the climate change we are witnessing is primarily human-caused, that the human component of the climate forcing will increasingly dominate the climate system, and that we face multiple catastrophic impacts if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon. Second, they work to delay this country from taking any serious action beyond perhaps investing in new technology (although even that is mostly lip service since the overwhelming majority of deniers and delayers are conservatives and libertarians who oppose all serious efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of low carbon technologies).
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Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.
Steve Running on the 5 stages of climate grief. Following up on this 5 stages, Romm adds a final (though loftier) kind of denialism:
Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
Actually this is a form of denialism I do not subscribe to. I believe we in fact are capable of slowly destroying the planet without taking corrective action. Global warming is a slow-acting disaster without direct effects. Even if the North Pole totally de-ices, that doesn’t impress people in Houston. The problem with global warming.
(I’ll be commenting more about Steve Running in a future post).
Here is a listing of climate change denialist arguments, ranked in order of popularity.
The Denialist blog is a great science blog dedicated to debunking pseudo-science. (Here’s a Deck of Cards about how to recognize/refute denialists.
(Even though i published this, I have a few more links to add).
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