Readers may recall this WUWT story: Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature.
Meanwhile, the discussion continues at John Nielsen-Gammon’s Climate Abyss website on Skeptics are Not Deniers, with part 3 now posted. Part 4 will likely be at this link today
At Jo Nova’s she has a response from Dr. Paul Bain. She writes:
Dr Paul Bain has replied to my second email to him which I do most appreciate. (For reference, see the letter he is replying to here: “My reply to Dr Paul Bain — on rational deniers and gullible believers” ). He deserves kudos for replying (it’s easier to ignore inconvenient emails), and also for taking some action to improve the article he published. I will reply properly as soon as I can. For the moment, and for fairness’s sake, it’s here for all to see.
… No, I don’t think there is any scientific reason (or definition in the English language) that validates the term “denier”, but Nature is going to publish an addendum this time, and that will be noticed by other researchers in the field. That is progress. Though there is a long way to go. — Jo
Bain writes:
As we all know, after publication it quickly became clear that the “denier” label was causing offence, and I contacted the journal’s editors to canvass options for addressing this. As the article was already published, it was agreed that the most practical option would be to include an addendum to the paper where we publicly expressed our regret about any offence we caused. This will be appended to both the online and printed versions of the paper. As you said, you yourself did not mention a link with Holocaust denial (and I myself did not hold such a link), but this was by far the most common association made by people who took the time to write to me personally to express their offence. By doing this, I don’t expect this to resolve (or even reduce) any issues (I fear that the damage is done), but I thought this was an appropriate thing to do nonetheless.
Full story here at Jo Nova’s
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What struck me in Bain’s response was this:
“As we all know, after publication it quickly became clear that the “denier” label was causing offence”
Especially since I too share the view of ‘warmist’ (?) docrighards, of Bain’s profession, who says:
“As a psychiatrist, I can confirm that telling someone who is in denial that they are in that state will almost always give offense. Depending on the intelligence and education of the patient, they will also defend their position with detailed and time consuming arguments” (*)
I defies plausibility that he was not aware, could not have imagined the provoking pointed implications read into it, and the reactions it would cause. After all, it is was the central topic of his paper, and the effort clearly was aimed at providing support for the ‘orthodox’ side.
Further, in psychiatry the term ‘denier’ (also there perceived as offensive) refers to a defense mechanism, a state of mind where internal unpleasent realities are kept out of concious awareness, and instead often placed or seen elswehere.
How this ‘denialism’ relates to debating the nature and physics of the atmosphere and how it functions and what makes it fluctuate and vary, or any heated political/policy-debate is also hard to see. Of course, in any political fight, name-calling and smearing is standard procedure, but maybe Bain thinks this is legit from one side. Or even believs that the labels are arguments (at least by one side?).
Anyhow, it is quite difficult to reconcile the tone, what was written and implied in the paper etc, with the concerned afterthought and even remorse which is displayed now. Or if genuine, it implies that he had no understanding at all of the topic of hus study … that such studies are just churned out, because you can … (get them funden, and also published) .. or both.
(*) The terms: “warmists, alarmists, eco-worriers, ecofascists” all have well understood, even defined meanings. And they are (most often) selectively used for those narrower groups for which they apply. (Which does not exclude them from being used as contentious insults occasionally). But, nota bene, you would not find them (submitted to or) printed in scolarly journal articles. Even although they have much more descriptive substance than nonsens-terms such as ‘climate denier’ or ‘denialist’
Getting 403 Forbidden error trying to access Jo Nova’s site as of 9:17AM Pacific Time 7/12/12
Nova gets a knock up from the 403 Climate Police !
As to the ‘potential three sided debate’. These is the Big Warm…Little Warm….and the always proper to consider, Null Hypothesis…or the Zero Warm. Those of the Null persuasion have been marganilized by both of the ‘legitimate’ sides as unqualified hobbists. The Nulls have gathered, presented legitimate arguements, articles and experiments. Here is the CV of just a partial list of those who see NO Carbon back radiation warming….
http://principia-scientific.org/index.php/about/why-psi-is-proposed-as-a-cic.html
Let us hope that our dear Jo is not being hit with the $1.1MM fine for her thought crimes.
when I try to click on the hyperlinks to Jo Nova all I get is
“Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /wp/index.php on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”.
Are the links accurate or has something happened?
Re: docrichards
The basic physics might dictate a warming of ~0.8C for a doubling of CO2 but the climate system has feedbacks. Some of these feedbacks are positive and others are negative. If the negative feedbacks outweigh the positive than this would dampen the rise to less than 0.8C and if they are positive then it would amplify it to more than 0.8C.
Therefore if your answer is an unqualified yes (or no) then you would be incorrect.
I would accept “deniers” if they consistently and in the same writings used “believers” or, better, “co-religionists”.
As we all know, after publication it quickly became clear that the “denier” label was causing offence, and I contacted the journal’s editors to canvass options for addressing this.
This faux-surprise that calling someone a ‘denier’ could be deemed offensive is a little wearing. The links to the holocaust were continual once the term was first used – I believe by James Hansen.
In 2009 in a guest article in the Guardian James Hansen wrote:
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. “
By line reads:
• James Hansen is director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He was the first scientist to warn the US Congress of the dangers of climate change
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal
So this was written not in ‘his personal capacity’ but as a NASA Director.
It is pretty explicit language and again links direct to the Holocaust. So I find the professed naivete of Dr Bain and others difficult to believe.
Docrichard wrote:
“The debate about terminology is peripheral. The central argument is about climatology, and in particular, whether the hypothesis that climate sensitivity for doubling of CO2 is capable of being supported by the data.”
Congratulations on the appropriate use of the word “hypothesis” (language not often used by supporters of CAGW) but you otherwise miss the point.
No “debate” can take place when one side insists that the matter is “settled” and that the other camp is “in denial”. I am not a psychiatrist but, for me, to “deny” implies:
1) that there is an unquestionable “truth” to be denied
2) the “deniers” are fooling themselves
OR
3) the “deniers” actually know the truth and deliberately lie.
The latter case is implied by the repeated accusations by many warmists that anyone who speaks out against CAGW hysteria is somehow in the pay of the fossil fuel industry.
It is language like this that has polarized this issue. As you acknowledge when you write:
“You call us warmists, alarmists, eco-worriers, ecofascists &c, and we use the term deniers.”
I do not call you an “ecofascist”. I don’t know you. But the label is appropriate for some people in ‘your’ camp (Google “10:10 video”). I think there are far more people who could accurately be described as “ecofascists” than those who are actually “oil-company shills”.
The “denier” label is only one part of a recurring theme in alarmist rhetoric i.e. that the “deniers” are in some way mentally deficient. One need only visit your own blog http://greenerblog.blogspot.co.uk/ (which you link to in your comments) and scroll down 5 posts to find yet another example of this.
In “Theoden and Lovelock Related?” you imply that James Lovelock’s recent about face on global warming (or perhaps I should refer to it as the moment he stopped denying the truth) is the result of dementia. If you really are a qualified psychiatrist (as well as “a longstanding Green Party activist”) then shame on you.
JoNova is in AUSTRALIA where it is 2:53 AM. She likely will not be up to check on her web site for another 3-6 hours.
“1 Do you accept that the anthropogenic CO2 released so far commits the Earth to a temperature rise of ~0.8*C?”
No
There is ‘natural climate variability’. And the warming effect of CO2 is logarithmic.
The predictive power of the GCMs has been proven hopelessly wrong. Hansen in Science (1983) predicted CO2 overpowering all other climate factors by 2000 at the latest, resulting in year on year warming from then on. His model has been comprehensively falsified.
I am a GP. I know that in the UK, there is a move by some psychologists to characterise those sceptical of the theory of CAGW (aka deniers to you) as suffering from a mental illness. Seminars have been run on this theme. Are you in agreement with those psychologists?
“Denier” was used to invoke a moral equivalence to Holocaust denial. Period. Paragraph.
A disgusting and desperate tactic.
I started looking at the global warming issue a dozen or so years ago. The skeptics, then and now, were dealing with the evidence and finding it wanting. They have always made more sense.
Global warming was and still is being sold as something unprecedented and dramatic. It is neither. We’re in the Holocene, an inter-glacial period. I have yet to be shown anything unusual happening in that context.
@docrichard
My answer would be no and I am definitely not in denial of basic physics with that answer.
You sound like you are trying to repeat some propaganda that you heard on another blog and just got it wrong. (I’m going to assume that you are asking the wrong question by mistake and not out of total ignorance). The “greenhouse” effect of CO2 may be rooted in basic physics but that may or may not have an effect on the temperature of the earth. That’s what we call climate and it is the result of an extremely complex interaction of many affects most of which we don’t understand and one of the least of which is probably CO2. IMHO. (And before you get started, yes I know the earth is warmer than it would be without CO2 but that’s not the argument, is it.)
Jeff Clarke
Dr. Paul Bain
Re: “expressed our regret about any offence we caused.”
You appear to be trying to excuse yourself with “any offense”.
A proper apology is to state your “regret for ALL the offences we caused”
You impugned those who disagree by inferred denial of the holocaust.
You denigrated scientists seeking to follow the scientific method.
You made rhetorical attacks on “climate realists” who accept
that global warming is occurring – since the Little Ice Age
that there are anthropogenic causes to global warming –
from every ploughed field, every road, and every village, town, and city.
The issues under question include
the MAGNITUDE of the climate feedback on top of CO2;
the PORTION of CO2 due to anthropogenic causes;
the uncertainty in the measurements; and most importantly,
the PHYSICS of clouds.
An objective evaluation of the evidence shows that NONE of these are resolved.
Rather, the mean of the IPCC model trends of 0.2 C/decade is now at 2 sigma boundary of possible temperature trends with red noise for the last 32 years. i.e., outside about 95% of the data (> 97% from one side.) I.e., rejected in common usage.
docrichard
_____________
On your website, you attempt to link an increase in earthquake activity to man made global warming.
While you may not realize that you have incorporated several logical fallacies into your arguments here at WUWT, for many of us, you’ve marked yourself as one of the unschooled.
Regardless, your website really tells us all we need to know.
docrichard: ‘Do you accept that the anthropogenic CO2 released so far commits the Earth to a temperature rise of ~0.8*C?’
What basic physics? Have a look at this: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/mdgnn-limits-on-the-co2-greenhouse-effect/
60+ year old metallurgical data used to design furnace show emissivity therefore absorptivity of CO2 in dry air at room temperature levels off at ~200 ppmV in a long optical path. This radiative phenomenon is called self absorption and means there can apparently be no CO2-AGW.
Do the ‘PET bottle’ experiment with 1/12th the wall thickness [a Mylar balloon is PET], and you apparently don’t get detectable warming. Thus thermalisation of absorbed IR is probably indirect, at cloud droplets by pseudo-scattering you derive from simple statistical thermodynamics. – the IPCC’s physics is totally wrong as any IR specialist will confirm: Happer warned of this in 1993. Also there can be no more than ~9 K present GHE because 24 K is from lapse rate independent of the type of gas. Oh, and there is virtually no GHE on Venus, it’s mostly lapse rate!
As for the heat transfer at boundaries, horribly wrong and I was a process engineer so an expert. These people have made amateur assumptions such as IR emission from the Earth’s surface is the same as that from an isolated black body in a vacuum, simply not true as any professional engineer or physicist will confirm and you can see for yourself in a handbook like McAdams Heat transfer – convection and radiation are coupled.
The problem is that Meteorologists are taught ‘downwelling LW’ exists when it does not.and misinterpret single pyrgeometer readings as proving it when it’s simply a measure of temperature. These mistakes mean the models contain a perpetual motion machine exaggerating heat input by 40%, the IR by 400% then offset mostly by incorrect cloud physics [see: http://www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf p. 5].
Of course you may think I’m a mad, deluded denier but do you think I and others on a similar track would have gone to this depth simply because we’re crazy? IPCC science needs rebuilding from its basics with professional physicists and that’s 40 years’ high level R&D experience talking including 20 years in CO2-related areas. Deniers Rule OK!
docrichard (7:45 am):
You’re missing the point. Call those skeptical of catastrophic AGW theory “deniers” all you want in blogs or in conversation. But if it’s in Nature, it’s analogous to the case in which they publish an article calling supporters of catastrophic AGW theory, “warmists, alarmists, eco-worriers, ecofascists,” to use your terms. If such terms were used, I would be equally disappointed in Nature. Such commentary does not belong in that (once-?) esteemed journal, or any truly unbiased journal.
I just sent Jo an email:
Hi Jo,
I keep getting this message when I try to access your web site:
“Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /wp/index.php on this server.”
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.?
Others at WUWT are having the same problem. Has Gillard and her criminal mates shut you down? Bet they would love to do that.
Regards a Jo fan
An interesting blog by a holocaust survivor who has also published on the subject of climate change:
http://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/2012/04/
Bain’s statement,
strikes me as incredibly condescending. If he was at all serious the statement should be similar to
Not a nebulous past tense, but an affirmative present tense!
I choked through Bain’s reply on Jo Nova’s site the other day. I decided to not reply as I was still too incensed by his vague ramblings, nor could I clearly follow some of his wordings from one sentence to later/before in his reply.
As of 2:20PM EST, I can not access Jo’s site. I tried with Safari and IE9 and both report a 403 error still.
Could Australia be censoring Jo Nova? (not an accusation, just a question)
One more reply to torture DocRichards;
Anyone with half a brain would deny 0.8C increase per doubling of CO2 based on basic physics. It may be 0.8C, but there’s no way you can get their just on basic physics.
Do you doubt gravity works? Ever drop a piece of paper on a windy day? Does it take exactly (square root of the height divided by the square root of 1/2 acceleration of gravity) seconds to hit the ground? Are you going to deny basic physics based on that?
The world is a massive chaotic system. Your number for doubling assumes a closed system. Simple physics would actually tell us it is more likely that the size of our atmosphere would expand, rather than the temperature increase, given only an increase in CO2 concentration. We don’t know for a fact what all the feed backs are and what their net effect on this huge chaotic system is. Never mind that other huge variable, some 93 million miles away which we do not fully understand.
In conclusion, if you are asserting that our entire climate system is controlled by one basic physical element, then I will tell you that you have little place in this debate.
If you try to denigrate skeptics based on this ridiculous litmus test, I will tell you that you have no real place in any intelligent discussion whatsoever.
And finally; I will tell you that you need to look around; this is exactly the type of absurd argument the AGW alarmists use, day in and day out, in lieu of any rational debate.
They simply try to denigrate anyone who questions either their ‘science’ or their motive.
That is the hallmark of charlatans and swindlers in every age.
Also getting a 403 response.
It seems to me that AGW alarmists are readers of Nietzsche and not of science. Nietzsche who said: “All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. “
On the issue was there a plan that AGW is a part of. When I read ed reforms from the 1970s where the author is connected to UNESCO they are clearly looking for a global catastrophe to justify telling people what they must do. Most likely concern is freezing but they ponder either possibility. They want something as international leverage. Education at that point was starting to go affective to create greater sympathy for nuclear disarmament.
The Swedes by the mid-1980s are talking about 3 transformative initiatives Gorbachev is pushing. The perestroika restructuring and the glasnost openness that get covered in the West. The 3rd they say was to create a successor economics to capitalism and socialism and premise it around the environment.
That 3rd scenario is the push in the Club of Rome’s early 90s book The First Global Revolution.
I have been writing about how Riane Eisler’s caring economics pushed through the Dag Hammarskold Foundation fits the scenario imagined. It also suggests she knows nothing about economies. But it is all about creating new values to take care of Mother Earth. My concern is that it pushes a partnership education to create the desired mindset and fits the communitarian ethos that is so much a part of the actual ed reform implementation all over the world. Not just US. Canada, Australia, UK, Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa are all in my documents.
Unfortunately as we well know, misguided can still mean horribly influential. Look at what it did for Gore.
Here are seven terms warmists can use as substitutes for “/b>denier,” from most accusatory to least:
Ostrich is as strong as Denier, lacking only an association with Holocaust denial and psychiatric diagnosis. It implies willful and irresponsible ignorance. It’s long been in common use in political and social debate.
Pooh-Pooher (or Minimizer). Almost as strong as Ostrich, but doesn’t suggest as strongly that the case is closed. However, there is a connotation of some degree of unthinking, reflexive complacency and failure to be appropriately alarmed..
Scoffer. There is some connotation here of a mere reflexive cynicism, but not so much of willful and irresponsible blindness.
Contrarian. Nearly neutral, but still has some connotation of a merely reflexive “agin”-ism.
Dissenter. Neutral.
Dissident. Positive connotation.
Deviationist. Even more positive connotation (suggests an anti-totalitarian).
First, a quick reply to David Ross. The Theoden/Lovelock is not a suggestion that Lovelock is dementing, it is using a device used by a UK publication, Private Eye. Here is an example: http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=lookalikes&issue=1315#215