Yes in the wake of the Climate McCarthyism we see on display against Lennart Bengtsson, I wonder if these people might re-think some of their own roles in the smearing of climate skeptics?
The webcast is on now at Yale Climate Connections, and is titled:
“Re-thinking Climate ‘Denialism’”
May 15, 2014, 2:30pm EDT, 11:30am PDT
From http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/30onclimate-videos/
As discussions drag on over what to do about our warming climate, let’s step back to reconsider the battlefield of rhetoric and discord. And how and whether it eventually can lead to harmony.
Political scientist and climate change policy expert David G. Victor, of the University of California at San Diego, encourages changing labels and strategies in ways that recognize a more complex political landscape. No more “climate denialist” name-calling, he urges.
Co-author of the recently published mitigation report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Victor will be the featured guest on The Yale Forum’s next 30onClimate webcast — May 15 at 11:30 am PDT (2:30 pm EDT).
30onClimate moderator Bruce Lieberman will interview Professor Victor about the complicated rhetorical landscape of climate change, and importantly, what the latest report from the IPCC has to say about where the globe’s climate is headed and what we can do about it.
You can access the webcast either by Google+ or YouTube feed
Have a question? Send an e-mail now!
Some background:
“Bizarre and threatening” is the term U.C. San Diego political science professor David G. Victor uses to describe how many in the climate science community view what some call climate “denialism.”
But Victor thinks a big part of the problem involves just how scientists and their supporters approach the subject — beginning with the use of the term “denialism.”
“If you really want to understand what motivates these people and what motivates the captains of industry and voters who listen to them,” says Victor, “stop calling them denialists.”
Source: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2014/03/climate-denialism-through-eyes-of-uc-davis-political-scientist/
“Re-Thinking” is Marxist jargon, and like all Marxist jargon, it does not mean what it sounds like it means. The phrase is deliberately misleading.
You watch one day the spin doctors will announce that it was a tough job but we succeded and climate change is no longer a threat
In a related matter in the region where David Victor works, we now have alarmists declaring the San Diego fires a “wake up call” while UCSDs own climate change website on Santa Ana wind conditions says that springtime Santa Ana winds are common.
Furthermore, if anyone ever wanted to look at stats related to a series of events and infer a human cause, the ignition times and locations of the 9 San Diego fires almost rule out entirely natural ignition of the fires. Arson (a human intervention if there ever was one) sticks out as a likely cause.
Yet the community that yells “denialist” and “irrational” at us doesn’t seem to even contemplate that some person(s) might have lit these fires – it undermines that guilt laden narrative and highly oiled blame treadmill that gets fired up at every natural disaster.
/Rant off
Folks need to be careful here, many of us sceptics are not card carrying left or right wing nutters, but live pragmatically in the real world in between. There’s a danger of colouring climate change with one political hue, the danger being that it’s actually not that clear cut, despite what some of the more lunatic fringes would have us believe.
We will know they have really come to proper terms when they start calling us “infidels”—-from their point of view, which is a religious, pseudoscientific faith in an approaching climate apocalypse, we are unbelievers, heretics, and infidels. “Denialist” just does not get to where these purportive scientists have gotten to.
Only in religion do proclamations of faith and condemnations of dissent grow in inverse proportion to the facts supporting the believer’s world view. The religious shout at the non-believers not only to suppress dissent but also to quiet the doubts in their own heads.
Nobody in their right mind could look at the absence of warming in the last two decades and not have doubts about the rectitude of the climate models on which the great faith is based on. The doubts are painful to a believer, and shouting at dissenters is a kind of anesthetic.
“Infidels!!” That is what they really think we are.
Is “Re-thinking” anything like “Re-education”?
Beesaman: right on. I’m turned off just as fast by right-wing group-think as by left, and I know I’m by no means the only one.
Reality speaking – the CAGW group own the political discourse in the media and publications, but they have failed to win over the public. Now their only method they have left is the use of force to prevent the growing voices of dissent. They know the public is their enemy. Nature itself is not cooperating – they have no where else to run and hide. Force is their last option.
beesaman says:
May 15, 2014 at 11:46 am
“Folks need to be careful here, many of us sceptics are not card carrying left or right wing nutters, but live pragmatically in the real world in between. ”
Ah, so you’re a Hegelian calling other people nutters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
I can’t speak for the Climatist priesthood, of course, but I would suggest they regard skeptics as more ‘heretics’ than ‘infidels’ (hence the term ‘deniers’). After all, infidels (who adhere to a different or no True Belief) can be converted; heretics (who claim the tenets of the True Belief are false) have to be eliminated.
/Mr Lynn
I’ve just finished reading Dr Brian Fagan’s “The Little Ice Age” for the
second time. I paid particular attention to the violent storms which he
documents. They hit the North Sea coasts some twenty to thirty years
or so after cooling started. They were vicious, and very destructive
with over 30.000 deaths attributed to one.
The irony is these climate warmists are right in one sense. We are headed
for bad or worse `extreme weather.’ But they are wrong about the reason
or mechanism. The Sun has entered a quiescent phase with most of the
indicators of its magnetic activity also showing lows. This decline may have
been responsible for the current 17-year `pause.’
Historically, significant climatic cooling has been associated with these
lows, so we can most likely expect some of that to occur this time. The
PDO has peaked and gone into the cooling part of its cycle. We can
definitely expect some cooling from that. I remember the `incoming ice
age’ of the middle 1970’s when the PDO reached the bottom of its cycle.
One plus one equals two. Don’t sell your shares in wool!
Not that my opinions matters, but I think it’s better to refer to the other side as “people concerned about global warming” rather than alarmists or warmanistas or what have you. Even though we are called deniers and criminals and worse by the other side there’s no reason to sink to their level. It would be nice if they could refer to us as “people who are skeptical about global warming” too, after all we’re all people in the end. Of course I doubt it will ever happen, but it would be nice.
“Rethinking Climate Denialism”
They’re idiots at Yale, though from what I have read, innocent ones. For example, they probably actually believe the “captains of industry” are on the skeptics’ side. They certainly cannot follow the money.
Also, they are naive from a strategic communications point. Extreme ostracism against the skeptics is the ONLY profitable strategy to keep the money flowing. For example, acceding to ideas of lower climate sensitivities would destroy tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, in value in the carbon (dioxide) markets.
I hang out with a bunch of avowed atheists, but due to their politics they embrace the religion of climate change, it is maddening for me but I just do not bring up politics or CAGW.
No DirkH, I’m a Pragmatic Realist somewhat along the lines of James, Dewey, Peirce, Haack, Rescher, Biesta etc…
Giovanni Papini likened Pragmatism to “a corridor in a hotel room. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you might find a man writing an aesthetic volume; in the next someone on their knees praying for faith; in a third a chemist investigating an element’s properties…They all own the corridor, and all must pass through it.”
Sadly Papini was a bit right wing, as many were of his generation in that part of Italy but his analogy is still not bad.
For me Pragmatism rests in the usefulness of the scientific method, but not in a blind obedience to it, as Pragmatism demands of science the same fallibilism that it demands in all things, which is not the same as a blanket scepticism as it allows for action based upon plausibility (abductive reasoning). For me some of the claims made by ‘Climate Scientists’ are just not plausible.
Just call the alarmists “racist bigots” for wishing to damn non-white Third-Worlders to a life of respiratory distress breathing fecal dung fire fumes in every dark hut.
. Beesaman wrote: “There’s a danger of colouring climate change with one political hue”.
You make a valid point, but you have to realize; it is the LEFT that has made this choice, and no one else. Name a single influential Democrat in the US today who will say, on the record, that he doubts that “climate change” is an absolute fact, and really isn’t a dangerous threat that must be addressed immediately. I can’t.
When one side goes lock stop in favor of an ideology like they have, the die is cast. They have decided that anyone who doubts the reality of “climate change” is on the “Far Right”, and if you oppose them that is what you will be called, no matter whether you think you belong there or not. The choice of labels isn’t yours, it’s theirs.
(and this might be useful in pointing out that quite a few other people who are labeled “far right” by the media noise machine really don’t deserve that label, either. That’s just the label they use to marginalize people who have ideas that they don’t want to deal with honestly.)
WWS – not everyone lives in America… 🙂
“John Boles says:
I hang out with a bunch of avowed atheists, but due to their politics they embrace the religion of climate change, it is maddening for me but I just do not bring up politics or CAGW.”
This is not surprising at all, but I do not think it is necessaily connected to their “politics”. I am a Catholic Christian myself, and I believe that God has put a desire in all of us to connect with something mysterious and much, much greater than ourselves. Some of the most “religious” people you will ever come across are atheists. From my own biased point of view – CAGW, Earth Worship/extreme environmentalism , the most extreme whackos in PETA, etc are all ways of simply trying to fill a hole that is in each of us. I am a believer in both science and Christianity, and I believe there is truth in both pursuits, but they are mostly separate, in the sense that truths gained by proper scientific study, while often of great benefit to mankind, are not the ones that necessarily get one closer to God and his eternal (timeless) kingdom, which exists in dimensions we have not and likely will never discover through science; and many of the truths of God and his kingdom are not necessarily applicable to scientific study . But, science itself can become a religion as well for some people.
This is what gets me about some of the commenters on WUWT – the absolute need to create a solid block of people to hate without definition.
I grant that most of the political rhetoric on man-made climate change has come from the progressive left in the US, a clear demographic that includes not a few academics. But those of us of an independent mind would say that the drawing of battle lines in this has come from the “Exclusionist Right” with its rhetoric of removal of any democratic rights to those who don’t believe in certain core political beliefs and the pillorying of large parts of America who don’t think like that as “Marxists, communists, socialists and liberals”.
What progressives have learned about how they conduct themselves in the climate debate is a near perfect mirror of the politics and rhetoric of exclusion as practiced by some conservatives since the Reagan Administration and the rise and rise of Karl Rove. Attack at every opportunity and never ever apologise for any mistakes. Attack the person not the argument. Decry your opponents as shills of Big XXXXXX whatever that may be. Circle the wagons with like-minded people and call it a consensus. Proclaim that America is under threat if these people are heard. Exclude them from the floor of the debate by any means possible. Make preposterous and offensive comparisons with the Nazis and the Holocaust. Make claim to speak for the “Silent Majority” and for unborn generations. Mischaracterise the arguments of your opponent in the most bone-headed offensive way.
Science is the most profitable enterprise both financially and intellectually the world has ever known. I type this on a machine massively more powerful than the one used on Apollo 11, a testament to the power of science and of competitive and open markets.
But climate science has been overtaken by fervent religious beliefs of exclusionary apocalyptic alarm and all I can hope is that science, done properly and well, will endure and the tsunami of irrationality will abate, leaving most of the good stuff behind.
It isn’t left and right, because anyone can be fooled by their own unstated biases and unconscious pre-conceptions. Witness Roy Spencer rejecting Darwinian Evolution and stating his belief in “Intelligent Design”, a clearly religious belief in biologic origins that has no evidence other than assertions to ignorance and incredulity and no predictive capability whatsoever. I don’t believe in evolution by process of natural selection because I like it and want it to be that way, but because it makes sense of the history of life on Earth in a way that no competing theory has ever done.
Why did I reject AGW? Partly because I recognized the very strong religious background to this supposed Theory of Everything that in my view is as pervasive and unfalsifiable as the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall of Man. It is Creationism in secular garb. Little wonder that it proponents are on the hunt for backsliders and infidels.
Maybe some of them are finally catching on about the disadvantages of using counter-productive epithets. What they still don’t get is that people who know some basic science can see through them and recognize when there is something fundamentally amiss. If you know anything about cheese or eggs or fish or wine the sniff test tells you “No Thanks!”
Am I being too cynical when I observe that a “challenging funding environment” is (at least partly) causing the request for “re-thinking”?
Rethinking would mean that climate scientist would have to remove their snot from the trough. And that ain’t going to happen.
David Victor is clueless as to the motivations of skeptics/climate realists so he invents some categories, which are basically straw men.
Including a mention to the “captains of industry” makes any other nonsense appear trivial. I laughed out loud.