From an editorial from nature.com, and published in the journal, they seem to think the d-word is proper vernacular.
Volume: 467, Page: 133 Date published: (09 September 2010) DOI: doi:10.1038/467133a
The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge.
…
There is a growing anti-science streak on the American right that could have tangible societal and political impacts on many fronts — including regulation of environmental and other issues and stem-cell research.
…
The right-wing populism that is flourishing in the current climate of economic insecurity echoes many traditional conservative themes, such as opposition to taxes, regulation and immigration. But the Tea Party and its cheerleaders, who include Limbaugh, Fox News television host Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who famously decried fruitfly research as a waste of public money), are also tapping an age-old US political impulse — a suspicion of elites and expertise.
Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”. The Tea Party’s leanings encompass religious opposition to Darwinian evolution and to stem-cell and embryo research — which Beck has equated with eugenics. The movement is also averse to science-based regulation, which it sees as an excuse for intrusive government. Under the administration of George W. Bush, science in policy had already taken knocks from both neglect and ideology. Yet President Barack Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place” seems to have linked science to liberal politics, making it even more of a target of the right.
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They say in a sidebar that: “The country’s future crucially depends on education, science and technology.”
I don’t disagree, but we also need to separate science from the global warming ideology that has hijacked it. The current backlash they speak of has in fact been brought about in part by allowing this to happen. I’ll point out though that the sort of idealogy we see in the global warming movement doesn’t seem to pervade other sciences, at least until somebody demands that one of the science organizations embraces or endorses the cause. That’s when the dissent starts. For example:
American Physical Society rejects climate policy plea from 160 physicists
Dissenting members ask APS to put their policy statement on ice due to Climategate
Witness Nature using the word denialism, born of the politically nurtured global warming ideology. If Nature’s editorial staff was not indoctrinated to at least some of that ideology, I wager they’d have used a different word. And they wonder why there is dissent while at the same time they use the word to insult people. I encourage subscribers to call them to task on this use of the word.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
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Nature is no longer a science journal, but a part of the state political apparatus.
Thank God Nature is there telling us what to think. I can still believe in God right?
When I first looked at the quadrants at http://www.politicalcompass.org/test (recommended by peakbear – thank you), I thought that in the context of the Nature editorial it needed an extra axis, representing “attitude to science”. On reflection though, I think it is good enough as it stands. Anyone – sceptic or not – who accepts the validity of modern physics is also likely to accept the reality of the GHE. The difference may be in how they respond to uncertainty in the magnitude of that effect. Perhaps sceptics are more likely to also be libertarians and in turn more willing to accept this uncertainty, whilst authoritarians want to eliminate it. Which of course fits snugly with the view of environmentalism as an authoritarian and elitist political movement. Since (unlike Nature) I don’t want to label people, I’ll also point out that I’m not suggesting everyone who advocates mitigation policies is also green in this sense – although the opposite may be true. For the record, I came slap in the middle of the bottom half.
The sad thing is that, as I always understood from the four univerity science professors in my immediate family, Nature together with Science were the world’s two premier scientific journals. For a scientist to be published in Nature rated more brownie points than to be published almost anywhere else.
By espousing without question the propaganda emanating from the dominant anthropogenic global warming wing of the body of climatologists the journal has abdicated its premier position.
Thank you Roger Cohen.
PS I am a sceptic but having taken Philip’s test http://www.politicalcompass.org/test my results were:
Economic Left/Right: -0.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.56
I find, therefore, that I am definitely of the left, both economically and socially. So much for the suggestion that all sceptics must be right wing.
Why write and publish an editorial like this one in Nature? I think it is because the writer’s religion is apparently losing major AGW adepts and they are trying to rally their remaining lesser adepts before they abandon AGW for another religious cause.
As for the journal Nature, it is being more stridently political [where the grant money comes from after all : ) ] and un-scientific.
Watch for strategic shifts in US government major research funding. That will foreshadow the next noble cause that the ex-AGW adepts are fleeing to.
John
John says:
September 9, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Creation vs. evolution is a practical waste of time and talent. Whether life and the universe was purposely created or not has no practical implication in science and engineering. Life and the universe is what it is no matter how it originated.
A friend of mine, National Academy of Science member Phillip Skell whose claim to fame is in antibiotic research, separates biology into two fields – historic and experimental. He asserts that the former does not inform the latter and every practical benefit that flows from biology comes from the experimental side. I agree.
As a case in point you might be surprised to learn that evolutionary biology is not a required course to become a medical doctor. The reason is it has no bearing on anything in medicine and medical doctors have more relevant things to learn than they have time to learn them. Evolutionary biology would be a waste of precious time that could be better spent elsewhere.
You might also be interested to know that science was philsophically founded on the principle that God created a rational universe governed by consistent and inviolable laws that rational man could study and understand. In other words science began as the study of God’s creation and rested on the principle that the creation was consistent, rational, and hence could indeed be understood.
When it comes to the time wasted on the controversy I say “a pox on both your houses”.
Everytime I read something like this, I think of Robin Warren and Barry Marshall.
In the 1980’s they were viewed as crackpots and lunatics by their peers and even physically ejected from symposiums, in 2005 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine (yes Virginia, every so often the Nobel folks get something right).
****** Frank K. says:
September 9, 2010 at 8:49 pm
There is nothing “anti-science” about acknowledging that the government science gravy train must come to an end because we are trillions of dollars in debt!
*******************
That is exactly my position. I was a chemist in industry for 15 years before switching to programming. I still love science. It is fun, sometimes mysterious, and always intriguing. But we as a nation must come to grips with our spending. Scientists will have to bear a fair share of those cuts when, hopefully, the time comes. We are all looking at the prospect of a lower standard of living and leaner times all around. I would like to see the Federal government shrunk and out of business. You seldom hear a businessman talk without referring to the government in fear or with a hand extended to it. The market must be freed once again. That will get us out of this mess.
Eric Worrall says:
September 9, 2010 at 11:42 pm
“I’ve started calling warmists “Climategate Deniers”. Perhaps we should all give them a taste of their own medicine!”
I like the descriptive term “ice huggers”. The new tree huggers are the ice huggers!
I come from a long line of innovators and minor inventors (all of which is well- documented and authenticated) and have inherited an insatiable curiosity gene as part of my make-up – I really do need to know how stuff works. But because I have always become easily bored with mathematics this has ruled me out as any kind of scientist, so I opted for Fine Arts as a lifetime study and as a career. One of the things I have learned from this study is that societies are not great at learning from their own pasts. In the Medieval world our forefathers were overwhelmingly God-centred and tended to regard the few who questioned that mindset to be Godless, wicked and to be cast out immediately if not sooner. Which is why some of my English antecedents fled the Puritans and England and sailed for various parts of the New World.
I find it a little scary that what should be a noble publication devoting itself to disseminating the truth and enlightenment of the sciences is indulging in medieval bigotry.
What will be next from this quarter – Witch-sniffers?
This is all they have left. Science has abandoned AGW and politicians are now masquerading as scientists. The name calling and smears are the last desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but it is backfiring. I am conversing with more and more people who are turned off by the over the top attacks coming from the alarmists and who are becoming ever more skeptical of the AGW claims. The warmists are only discrediting themselves by refusing to discuss the science and ducking debate.
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -1.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.36
Almost dead center. Interestingly, although I’m not a card carrying member of the Tea Party, I mostly agree with them and hope they become the dominant force in US politics. Yet I’m a centrist. What’s up with that?
Does anyone know at which point Jeremy Clarkson’s piss-take coinage ‘denialist’ came to be seen as a real word?
It’s NOT the Science, it’s the Scientists. It’s the question of who and what controls the direction of science’s POLITICAL direction. It’s NOT about the Science!
Much as the weather changes from season to season, there are changes of season in educational and political philosophy that seem to last a few generations and then change again. Years ago Grade Schools, High Schools, Universities, and Colleges were run by, and students were taught by, shall we say rather conservative ‘academics’. During and after WWII, the conservative ‘Old School Mob’ gave way to the ‘New Age School Mob’ of rather liberal, sort’a free thinking, more-radical, quote open minded end quote academics and many ‘social changes’ also followed. As the Mob In Power ages and tends to think, more and more, that they are the only cheese in the firdge, things gradually change to a different and –shall we say– more enlightened way of thinking for the world.
Some might say, “The Pendulum Swings” back and forth and the so on and so on around the circle as the world turns. Others might say, “It’s a Paridigm Shift” kind’a thing. Whatever it’s called, it happens. It’s always happened. For those in the midst of the mayhem it very likely seems like billions of madmen and Englishmen are over the ramparts and through the gates and destroying and desacrating everything sacred and meaningful. This is only a reasonable reaction. Do not feel you are being treated any differently than your Young Turks treated their betters. Every displaced generation feels this way. It’s natural! Indeed, it’s one of Nature’s Laws. Get over it!
[Off topic – snip – (jove~mod)]
While I strongly agree that there is an anti-science streak, and a nearly fundamentalist pre-science, atreak afecting society right now – look no farther than the crazies trying to remove science from textbooks in Kanasas and Texas – there is also an anti-science streak on the left that takes bad science that supports their position as truth. We need a more civil discourse, science included, if we are going to move forward. Don’t watch Fox or MSNBC or Rush or Hannity, or Olbermann or MAddow.
Does anybody have a hockey-stick graph of Nature’s circulation statistics? Is their a direct correlation with the number of CAGW articles?
Changing times, the unavoidable “turn of the screw”, everything in life comes to an end: It’s being born, it grows, it gets older and finally dies. That secular dream of some secret societies to change the world almost succeeded for almost three hundred years: We have not yet returned to the natural paradised J.J.Rosseau envisioned, we didin’t get to live all naked, however you tried oldies now is the turn of the youth; just take it easy…cooooolit down, buy some pop-corn and wait.
Their “Pebbles Universe”, expanding and throwing its stones all around IS OVER. This is why I called it the “Flintstones Universe”, of those INITIATES (LOL!) who belong to the secret society of Peter Flintstone.
I will use my own D-word in regard to Nature:
Deluded.
There is an opportunity here: To publish a new science magazine. Why not WUWT Magazine?
Old lawyer joke:
If the facts are in your favour … hit them with the facts, else
If the law is on your side … hit them with the law, else
Just hit the table
Nature is now hitting the table.
Economic Left/Right: -1.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.03
Mmmm, that’s rather surprising, but then me being from the Netherlands 🙂
Al those things that make me proud to be Dutch, Same Sex Marriage, Abortion, Euthanasia, semi legal use of cannabis. The habits of the Dutch to always question authority and trying to bend the rules.