We’ve known for sometime that there’s an underlying, sometimes overt display of hatred towards climate skeptics. However, it generally never made it into science publications. Unfortunately, the editors of the journal Nature Climate Change just made one of the ugliest decisions ever with the publication of the Bain et al letter. One wonders though, if this were a study about… say, attitudes about racism, would the Nature Publishing Group allow things like the “n-word” in the graph and text? I think not.
Lest you think this is just one entry, read on:
Nature Climate Change | Letter
Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers
A sizeable (and growing) proportion of the public in Western democracies deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change1, 2. It is commonly assumed that convincing deniers that climate change is real is necessary for them to act pro-environmentally3, 4. However, the likelihood of ‘conversion’ using scientific evidence is limited because these attitudes increasingly reflect ideological positions5, 6. An alternative approach is to identify outcomes of mitigation efforts that deniers find important. People have strong interests in the welfare of their society, so deniers may act in ways supporting mitigation efforts where they believe these efforts will have positive societal effects. In Study 1, climate change deniers (N=155) intended to act more pro-environmentally where they thought climate change action would create a society where people are more considerate and caring, and where there is greater economic/technological development. Study 2 (N=347) replicated this experimentally, showing that framing climate change action as increasing consideration for others, or improving economic/technological development, led to greater pro-environmental action intentions than a frame emphasizing avoiding the risks of climate change. To motivate deniers’ pro-environmental actions, communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society, rather than focusing on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.
According to wordcounter.com “denier” is used 41 times in the full letter, seen here.
Here are your results…
| Word | Frequency |
| climate | 92 |
| change | 88 |
| denier | 41 |
| action | 32 |
| study | 21 |
Further down in the list, “believer” was used only 12 times, about a 3.5 to 1 bias.
One wonders if any of the peer reviewers or even the editors of Nature Climate Change raised any questions about the use of the term? I wonder if any of them even broached the subject at all, or if they just accepted the word without thought? Did any of them suggest “skeptic” as a more acceptable replacement? Clearly the authors of this study didn’t think twice about the word. I’d love to see the peer review notes for this one.
In case anyone thinks the word isn’t rooted in offensiveness, I’ll remind you of the syndicated column that gave the use of the word the big push:
I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. – Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, February 9, 2007 “No change in political climate” on the Wayback Machine here
Comically, one of the worst offenders of use of the word, Sacramento environmental advocate Dana Nuccitelli, doesn’t like it when the shoe is on the other foot:
dana1981 Submitted on 2011/09/24 at 5:42 pmPlease, can people stop using the acronym “SS”? The correct acronym is “SkS”
REPLY: On this we agree, folks please stop using it. Now Dana, would you agree to stop referring to people here and elsewhere using that other distasteful WWII phrase “deniers”. You’ll get major props if you announce that. – Anthony
Of course, we’ve stopped using “SS” (another well known reference to Nazi Germany) to refer to the website Skeptical Science, but proving himself a hypocrite, Skeptical Science contributor and editor Dana Nuccitelli has not returned the favor, and continues to be snipped here at WUWT for using the word. The word also continues use at Skeptical Science on a daily basis. It seems this is a common problem with AGW advocates, they have no sense of fair play, only dogma and thinly veiled hatred for people who disagree with their position.
Bishop Hill tipped me off to this story and has decided to send a letter to the editor of Nature, Dr. Rory Howlett, which I’m reproducing below:
Dear Dr Howlett
I have written a blog post on the Bain et al paper you have recently published. I found it quite surprising that a reputable journal would publish an article that contained so much offensive language.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/6/18/potty-mouthed-nature.html
I was wondering if you would care to comment on your decision to publish the article in this form. Did the editorial team consider asking the authors to use less incendiary language? Do you view your journal as having a role in encouraging civilised debate? Do you have policies on offensive language?
Thanks for your attention.
I think writing to the editor of Nature Climate Change to ask why he found the use of the offensive word that describes about half the population today (according to polls) acceptable, is an excellent idea. Here’s the details, from:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/about/about-eds/index.html
Chief Editor: Rory Howlett
Rory graduated in zoology from the University of Oxford and was awarded his PhD in ecological genetics from the University of Cambridge. Rory joined Nature in 1987 and was for 20 years an editor with the journal, where he developed wide-ranging interests in the biological and physical sciences and their interfaces. Between leaving Nature in 2008 and rejoining the Nature Publishing Group, Rory spent three years as Media and Communications Officer the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
The Nature Climate Change team is headquartered in the London editorial office:
Nature Climate Change Editorial Team
Nature Publishing Group
The Macmillan Building
4 Crinan Street
London
N1 9XW
UK
e-mail: nclimate@nature.com
When sending email, please be respectful and to the point.
Here is the letter I have sent:
=============================================================
Dr. Rory Howlett
Chief Editor
Nature Climate Change
Nature Publishing Group
The Macmillan Building
4 Crinan Street
London, N1 9XW, UK
Subject: Bain et al paper
Dear Dr. Howlett,
I was shocked to learn that Nature has apparently endorsed the use of the word “denier” which is deemed offensive by many people in the climate debate due to it being associated with Holocaust denial thanks to a widely syndicated opinion column in 2007:
I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. – Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, February 9, 2007 “No change in political climate” on the Wayback Machine here
I run the most viewed blog on climate change and global warming in the world, and have written an essay questioning Nature’s apparent endorsement of the use of the word in scientific literature, seen at: http://wp.me/p7y4l-h7K
I question whether the peer review process even broached the subject of the use of this word. We know from experience that Nature does not allow other offensive words describing groups of people or minorities in their scientific literature, so I and many others wonder why this exception was made?
I would hope that Nature would realize that this word is offensive to many people, and ask the authors of this paper to substitute a less offensive term, such as “skeptic” or “contrarian”.
Thank you for your consideration in this matter.
Best regards,
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Chico, CA USA
The CAGW alarmists have their intellectual leaders who are the strategists and it is obvious that leadersip excludes the one dimensional person we know as Sacramento environmental advocate Dana Nuccitelli (dana1981).
Nuccitelli is incapable of realizing that every time he refers to those critical of IPCC centric CAGWism as ‘deniers’ he increases skeptic energy and motivation to bring balanced scientific processes in opposition to the IPCC’s biased, myopic, policy informed assessments.
Nuccitelli is one of his movement’s Achilles heels.
John
It appears that the study in question has established the environmental movement as a religion and as such needs to be treated as one. Anyone who questions their beliefs are implied to be lower class citizens and prone to criminal activity. The sociologists suggest that deniers are victims of deception, ignorance, misunderstanding.
In any case, IAW the U S Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion…….” So those people are free to believe what they want but the government must stop funding them because it is unconstitutional.
Soryy. disregard my previous comment about funding. Those people are from Australia so hopefully the US is not funding them.
@Phil C says:
June 18, 2012 at 9:25 am
Have you ever read an article here that argues against the basic lab physics of CO2 and IR?
The most prevalent debate here is about feedbacks – i.e. if the overall system will significantly magnify (which is what the believers believe) or (i.e. what the vast majority of non-believers “believe” needs to first be disproven) that the system will not amplify (no feedback), or may even minimize (negative feedback) the effect of increasing CO2.
Furthermore, it has yet to be proven – as far as I’m concerned at least – that the micro-scale phenomenon of CO2 in a lab, means increasing atmospheric CO2 will yield anything other than noise in the grand (macro) scheme of things. It is an absolutely reasonable theory, don’t get me wrong, but the GCMs have proven useless for forecasting on any timescale – it is absolutely an article of faith IMHO that “[we have it mostly right this time around]” or that “[CO2 is the thermostat switch for our climate]”
Everyone should note the bait and switch
“A sizeable (and growing) proportion of the public in Western democracies deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. It is commonly assumed that convincing deniers that climate change is real is necessary for them to act pro-environmentally.
There are actually 3 issues here:
1. Most people accept that human activity has some effects on climate – the Urban Heat Island effect for example and razing forests. So the initial statement is not correct.
2. What people do not believe is the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. A grow line a few hundred miles poleward and a warmer wetter climate with more CO2 to increase plant growth and resistance to heat stress and drought are good things. The catastrophe hypothesis has not been proven indeed the huge perturbations in the past of CO2 and other effects without any catastrophe falsify the CAGW hypothesis,
3. It is not ‘deniers’ [sic] that do not believe in climate change it is the AGW proponents that use the straight hockey stick shaft to show that climate only changed recently and in an exceptional way. Thus the AGW proponents are the deniers of climate change attempting to claim against all the evidence that climate only changes due to anthropogenic inputs and that current changes are ‘exceptional’.
The device of accusing your debate opponent of what you yourself are doing is a common one – many of these approaches follow the Saul Alinsky rules. “”The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”. Do not respond to the goading from Nature they need the response.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
There is no reference list. None of the citations appear after the paper. In the HTML version of the paper on the Nature website, clicking on the in-text citation links go nowhere. One therefore cannot check their references. This is very strange and probably a mistake by Nature.
In any case, the affiliations of the authors: “School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia Queensland 4072, Australia Paul G. Bain, Matthew J. Hornsey, Renata Bongiorno & Carla Jeffries“, show that these people are almost certainly unable to themselves determine whether AGW skeptics have a scientific case.
Therefore, P. G. Bain, et al., literally do not know what they’re studying, and their entire study is a tendentious argument from authority.
[REPLY: the citations are in the .pdf version. -REP]
,
You clowns first, viz Poptech above. (See, at least I didn’t use “warmist”!)
The tone is reminiscent of articles about how to get your children to eat their vegetables. I’ll agree that the entirety of the article is offensive. A discussion about whether “African Americans” are intellectually less than “Caucasians” is no less offensive than one that uses the dog-Latin form of the word “Black”.
Are you f—— kidding me? A “denier” conversion propaganda article?
And this is published in NATURE [climate change], not a behavioral/social sciences journal?
(I guess that really says it all, climate change is not about nature, it’s about social engineering, and I will henceforth view this publication as such.)
Don’t they realize that by identifying ‘denial’ as an ideological position, they are, all on their own, making it an issue of belief and faith?
We say:
Disagree with your facts. Your methods are bad, your data is skewed, your conclusions are false and have been disproved time and again.
They say:
People don’t ‘believe’, ‘trust’; they ‘deny’ our contention.
The difference is abject and obvious.
I don’t even know what else to say.
i am happy to be referred to as a klimate kaffir.
it means so much to anybody who is perceptive.
As I read Bain’s letter to Nature Climate Change, two thoughts came to mind. First, I thought I was reading a ‘marketing presentation’ on how to sell toothpaste while avoiding any discussion of the properties of the toothpaste. Second, the paper seemed to be addressing the question:
If doing “X” increases your perception that you are a “good guy”, would you do “X”?
Duh! Maybe people who sell toothpaste should get paid for this kind of research, university professors shouldn’t.
A fan of *MORE* discourteousness says:
June 18, 2012 at 7:57 am
“WUWTs too-common use of terms like warmista unfortunately yielded WUWTs high-ground in climate-change debate.”
For great examples of highly paid, supposedly intelligent scientists yielding the high ground on the use of pejoratives in the climate debate, please see the climategate e-mails…
Without recognizing that they don’t have any scientific proof (unlikely ‘conversion’ using scientific evidence is limited because of “ideological positions”) they propose “An alternative approach is to identify outcomes of mitigation efforts that deniers find important. People have strong interests in the welfare of their society, so deniers may act in ways supporting mitigation efforts where they believe these efforts will have positive societal effects.”
So lacking proof of Man-made catastrophic global warming they propose to convince people to act as they want by convincing them that these same actions are beneficial in other ways.
So lets examine the basis of global warming alarmism. If any ONE of these is untrue then the theory that man must act to prevent global warming fails:
1. The earth’s average temperature is rising. (True – has been for hundreds of years)
2. The correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the rise in temperature, is causative (and/or amplifies the effects many times) – both NO
3. Carbon dioxide levels are rising as a result of human industrial activity. NO
4. the effects of warming temperatures are catastrophically negative. NO (actually likely to be generally positive)
5. by altering human activity to lessen the production of carbon dioxide, global warming may be mitigated. NO
With the old argument torn to shreds they are attempting a new approach:
The new argument:
would create a society where people are more considerate and caring
AND/OR
where there is greater economic/technological development
Well, we sure haven’t seen an increase in politeness from the global warming movement with associating skeptics with holocaust deniers, exploding their heads in TV commercials and threatening to burn down their houses. And if they are insisting that by just giving up and accepting the lie the greens would become less offensive it might be true but it is not appealing or acceptable.
On the subject of economic development: the green/global warming movement is harmful to economic development. Even green jobs “created” by government fiat spending destroys more jobs than it creates for a net negative.
On technological development: it may be true that taxing more of everyone’s money and getting to decide where it is spent they can promote technological development in their chosen area but it prevents people from spending money in a more productive fashion and once again is a net negative.
Almost anyone given the choice of spending their money where they choose or to have the government take it and spend it where someone else chooses will choose to spend it themselves. It is only when the idea is for the government to take OTHER peoples’ money so the greens get to decide where and how it is spent that the idea even makes sense.
So if it comes to promoting a society where people are more considerate and caring or where there is greater economic/technological development.
It doesn’t and it won’t.
Ed Caryl says:
June 18, 2012 at 6:51 am
The use of the word “believer” is extremely revealing! They have now confirmed for all to see that CAGW is a religion, not science.
——————————————————————
I thought that as well and thought the balanced approach would be to call the other group non-believers. As you say – if it require’s belief it is surely not science.
[REPLY: the citations are in the .pdf version. -REP]
But where is the pdf version?
Pat Frank is right – it makes no sense to blue-link the refs in the html version if they don’t go anywhere. If you go on to the next article, about seagrass, the ref links work.
[REPLY: Yeah, the lack of active links is a bummer. On the HTML page here is a box that gives options for print, email, pdf… click on the pdf option. -REP]
OK, found the pdf link now – don’t think it was there before though!
These people make no sense. What could they be thinking?
What are we stopping them from doing?
They already gather and publish worldwide whatever data they want.
They already pollute our sky line with windmills
They already blanket our lands with solar panels
They already shut down our power plants
They already sequester our resources
They already destroy manufacturing jobs
They already control our schools
They already stop development
They already tax us to the hilt
They already give away our money to their cronies.
Just what are we stopping them from doing?
Or is it, they want to continue to do all these things and they just want to provide enough propaganda to stop us from bitching about it.
@harold ambler
Can you get the segment you’ll be on Red Eye put on Youtube?
NickB. says:Have you ever read an article here that argues against the basic lab physics of CO2 and IR?
I can’t recall reading any article — for or against — basic physics, but that’s not what I asked about.
There must be a lot of scientific findings in the IPCC techincal report (WG I) that that the authors of this website agree with, and those are the articles I’ve never read here. Absent any references to what they do agree with, it’s easy for someone to use the “D” word instead of the “S” word because skeptics accept some of what they read, while deniers dismiss everything. I think that’s the critical difference and it would be a wise move to publish some posts on points of agreement with the IPCC technical findings.
Poptech says:
June 18, 2012 at 7:14 am
Anthony, do not waste your time trying to reason with zealots like Dana from the cartoonists website,
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html
They have no intention of seeking any sort of honest discourse.
====================================================
I wouldn’t waste my time with Nature, either. For the very same reason. Civil discourse is a fantasy of the skeptics. The thought that this was about science is a fantasy of skeptics.
This is, and always was, an attack on liberties and energy use by a bunch of freakish watermelons posing as scientists. That Nature publishes tripe like this is proof that this isn’t about science and that Nature is engaging in circular validation of themselves and the extreme leftist fringe.
Being as the AGW debate is neither philosophical, scientific or civil it is self evident that AGW is largely a political entity with no significant scientific component. Climate science is another matter.
Remember when jet-setting eco-whackposts fled freezing temperatures in Europe? They all gathered in sunny Cancun to demonstrate they had bought into the hoax. As faithful True Belivers of Big Brother’s AGW they were determined to agree on how best all must join together. And, who better than schoolteachers to save the world?
http://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/global-warming-a-419-scam-you-cant-refuse/
The whole paper is a joke. Typical psychobabble. They can’t see the contradiction in trying to manipulate or convert people to their way of thinking by insulting them.
I thought the paper resonated with the sort on convoluted nonsense the dribbles out of Stephan Lewandowsky’s brain. Lewandowski is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Australia and his circular rationalisation of AGW makes Judith Curry’s head spin. have a look at the credits for this paper and we have
Affiliations
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia Queensland 4072, Australia
Paul G. Bain,
Matthew J. Hornsey,
Renata Bongiorno &
Carla Jeffries
and also
This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP0984678) to the first author.
What an absolute bloody racket! Climate change funding for all! Ya just gotta sit back and laugh so you don’t go nuts over this utter drivel.
What really gets me about the psychologists getting in on the action, apart from getting their snouts in the funding trough – there is an understandable logic to that, is that it poses some delicious questions such as
a) Just what is the psychology of the repetitive use of hate language terms such as ‘denier’?
b) What is it about people who are apparently highly educated in a scientific discipline do not understand the difference between formulating a theory, supported by empirical data or not, and articulating it, on the one hand, and being credible communicators on the other?
c) Lawyers understand the notion of credible witnesses in their bones and so does Joe and Joanne Public ( and their kids) in a democratic society but why on earth does the whole notion just seem to completely elude the likes of the authors of this publicly funded toilet paper?
Oh for a couch to let these people relax and unburden themselves.
The voices of CAGW are becoming even more shrill now. If they had the science on their side, they would be talking about the science. Instead, they talk about everything but the science. They know we’ve turned a corner on AGW and they’re fighting it tooth and nail.
An animal is most dangerous when it is wounded and cornered. At least these people can only make noise and call us names.