Another Plea to Global Warming Alarmists on the Phrase “Climate Denier”

Cross-posted from Coyoteblog

Stop calling me and other skeptics “climate deniers“.  No one denies that there is a climate.  It is a stupid phrase.

I am willing, even at the risk of the obvious parallel that is being drawn to the Holocaust deniers, to accept the “denier” label, but it has to be attached to a proposition I actually deny, or that can even be denied.

As help in doing so, here are a few reminders (these would also apply to many mainstream skeptics — I am not an outlier)

  • I don’t deny that climate changes over time — who could?  So I am not a climate change denier
  • I don’t deny that the Earth has warmed over the last century (something like 0.7C).  So I am not a global warming denier
  • I don’t deny that man’s CO2 has some incremental effect on warming, and perhaps climate change (in fact, man effects climate with many more of his activities other than just CO2 — land use, with cities on the one hand and irrigated agriculture on the other, has measurable effects on the climate).  So I am not a man-made climate change or man-made global warming denier.

What I deny is the catastrophe — the proposition that man-made global warming** will cause catastrophic climate changes whose adverse affects will outweigh both the benefits of warming as well as the costs of mitigation.  I believe that warming forecasts have been substantially exaggerated (in part due to positive feedback assumptions) and that tales of current climate change trends are greatly exaggerated and based more on noting individual outlier events and not through real data on trends (see hurricanes, for example).

Though it loses some of this nuance, I would probably accept “man-made climate catastrophe denier” as a title.

** Postscript — as a reminder, there is absolutely no science that CO2 can change the climate except through the intermediate step of warming.   If you believe it is possible for CO2 to change the climate without there being warming (in the air, in the oceans, somewhere), then you have no right to call anyone else anti-science and you should go review your subject before you continue to embarrass yourself and your allies.

3 thoughts on “Another Plea to Global Warming Alarmists on the Phrase “Climate Denier””

  1. fwiw, Donna Laframboise:

    “Those of us who dissent from mainstream thinking about climate change truly are voices in the wilderness, analogous to the Rebel Alliance in the fictional Star Wars’ universe. Scattered, underfunded, thin-on-the-ground – that’s us.

    On the other hand, the forces assembled against us are massive.”

    http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/10/22/climate-rebel-reporting-in/

    I prefer ‘climate rebel’.

    Using their tags only empowers their propaganda.

    Whatever you choose, thank you & keep up the good fight!

  2. I deny the consensus climate science, entirely, from the “greenhouse effect” and “radiative transfer theory” on up. The consensus is based upon a throwing away of what was previously known–the stable vertical distribution of temperatures as found from numerous real-world measurements throughout the atmosphere and precisely defined in the Standard Atmosphere–in a misdirected pursuit of the possibility of a runaway global mean surface temperature (the greenhouse effect was originally brought forth, over a century ago, as a possible explanation for past “ice ages”, i.e., a runaway cooling). That pursuit has failed, in fact it has failed from its very beginnings in the 1960’s. I demonstrated over 3 and 1/2 years ago that the comparison of temperatures in the atmospheres of Earth and Venus–at points of equal pressure in the two atmospheres, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures–confirms the Standard Atmosphere. We are dealing with a two-generation long miseducation of climate scientists and a failed hypothesis of a global climate poised on the razor’s edge of “radiative forcings”. It is all total garbage.

  3. “I don’t deny that man’s CO2 has some incremental effect on warming, and perhaps climate change.”

    Why do you concede this? There is no compelling proof of a CO2 re-radiative warming effect. There may be some effect join ton, but it’s in the noise, in my view.

    There seems to be a need on the part of many skeptics to buy credibility among alarmists by conceding this point. I find it to be an unappealing weakness.

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