It wasn’t all that obvious but I was trying to avoid a logical fallacy by saying “skeptics”. What I should have written, and wanted to write, was “real skeptics”. So let me try again…

“And in actuality, I’m willing to be that most real skeptics – aka people who agree with the climate science – would agree with me on this one”.

In other words, you and I would agree that semantics is not worth debating and that we should get on with discussing policy. On the other hand, the deniers won’t because they know that semantics is a great way to spread FUD.

However, I find that sometimes the people on the side of science forget that and let themselves be led around into arguments on semantics instead of just ignoring it and moving on to discussing the actual science.

And in actuality, I’m willing to bet that most skeptics would agree with me on this one.

Don’t bet on it The fake skeptics will do everything in their power to maintain the status quo, because that means that (in their own fantasies about how the world works) they don’t have to give a flying f#ck/lift a finger to do anything about the mess we all now find ourselves in.

And that’s what it all comes down to. I’m a baby boomer myself, and who knew we would be paying the price of our collective indulgences, a la American Grafitti, just a few decades down the road?

ETA: and it’s not just the AGW, which is probably the most pressing issue of our time. It’s also the rampant consumerism. It’s not sustainable.

ETA deux: Nigel’s post above is probably the best one I’ve ever read concerning a rebuttal to the AGW deniers. Saving that text for a rainy day.

And this is the first time I’ve ever used “both sides” on this site… but I wish both sides would just shut up about ‘denier’ or ‘alarmist’ and just get back to policy and science. Although I know which one is more prone to doing it than the other, and it isn’t the one with science on their side. They know it’s a distracting tactic and so they keep harping on about it. Accurate or not, perpetuating discussion on semantics is just plain getting in the way of everything else.

I think this is why AGW is the one science topic that I quickly tire of reading about. It’s become so bogged down in circular semantics that one can’t get past it to discuss real issues or plans. At least creationists and anti-vaxxers move on past the name-calling onto other points of discussion.

And in actuality, I’m willing to bet that most skeptics would agree with me on this one.

If you don’t like the stigma that comes from stubbornly denying a well-documented fact, don’t do it.

Yes. This.

If a skeptic calls you an alarmist, this is not an insult, because it is honestly descriptive, and cannot be conflated with some other horrific historical political movement.

Show me an honest “skeptic” who calls people accepting the reality of AGW alarmist.

Reasonable AGW-scepticism ended some time around the mid-1990s. That’s the time around which the AGW conclusion gradually transitioned from “probable” into “so close to certain you might as well accept it as truth unless new evidence contradicts it”. Thus far, all of the new evidence has supported that conclusion.

All of the sceptics who have honestly assessed the data are now more focussed on what we might do to mitigate the impact of AGW. The only people who don’t accept the conclusion are those who have either been fooled by the deniers or are themselves actively denying AGW as a valid conclusion.

So, what exactly is an “alarmist” in this context?

Because it sounds to me like pure rhetoric. Whether AGW is a challenge to meet or something about which we should be alarmed is a value judgment, and is open to debate. What is perhaps truly alarming is the amount of money the fossil-fuel industries are spending on perpetuating the denialist mindset, where they should instead be focussing on how to transition to a low-carbon and (eventually) carbon-free energy economy.

But the term alarmist sounds like it is intended to polarise the issue and shut down rational debate.

To those of you here who fling the label “denier” while asserting that it contains no linkage to deniers of the Holocaust, you’re either very stupid or intentionally lying.

Rubbish!

Anyone who denies any aspect of reality in the face of overwhelming evidence is a denier. What they deny varies from denier to denier, but the fact of denial of humanity’s best understanding of reality links them all, at one level. Having said that, there is a significant difference between deniers of history (such as Holocaust deniers and 9/11 “truthers”) and deniers of relatively newly-understood facts (such as AIDS deniers and AGW deniers).

The former are largely certifiable, while the latter are more often misguided and / or deluded, apart from an activist core, who are outright liars serving an obvious agenda.

To answer your assertion – that calling an AGW denier a “denier” links them to Holocaust denial – is trivially easy. While the nomenclature denier labels them outright as a reality-denier, there is no specific link from AGW denial to any other category of denial.

Each person may not personally believe it that way, but you certainly intend for uninformed people to interpret it that way.

Poppycock!

Who the hell do you think you are to read the intentions of a whole group of other people without bothering to pay attention to what they are saying?

The use of the term denier is factually accurate – and what else can you call someone when they insist that an entire branch of science is either perpetrating the biggest and most implausible fraud in history, or is collectively deluded about its core conclusion?

As I understand it, the intended impact of the term denier is to highlight that the person is denying the accuracy of humanity’s best understanding of a phenomenon : a phenomenon that the denier typically has not taken the trouble to understand in any depth.

That’s the power of that word, and I’m 100% sure that’s why you use it.

Well, you are 100% wrong. I, for example, have never encountered Holocaust deniers, and I assume that their view is a minority one. I have, OTOH, often encountered reality-deniers in the form of creationists, antivax advocates, AGW-deniers and homeopathy-sympathisers. To be brutally frank, I don’t give a toss about Holocaust deniers, because I don’t see them having any impact on society. Whereas the other deniers are having an impact that I can see.

When I use the term “denier”, I don’t mean to associate that person with denying the Holocaust. I mean it to indicate that the person is denying the validity of a whole branch of human intellectual achievement.

Being politically correct, you understand this (and are therefore lying if you say there is no linkage) or you SHOULD understand it (and so are so ignorant that your opinions in this debate need not be respected).

You have yet to demonstrate that your contention has any crumb of truth. How do you know that the term makes people think of Holocaust deniers? How many people have you asked? Have you asked your questions in a sufficiently neutral way as to not sway the result? Have your findings been confirmed by independent surveys?

So, before you lay into Phil, or me, or anyone else who uses the term “denier” in relation to the denial of AGW, first you must show that there is a real issue to address.

Also, to call us skeptics deniers also implies a falsehood, that all the science that’s necessary to prove a case has been done.

This is also wrong.

As you would understand if you knew the first thing about science, with empirical phenomena there is no such thing as absolute proof. All of the science to “prove” that AGW is real is not possible. What has instead been done is enough science to demonstrate that the AGW conclusion is overwhelmingly likely to be correct – or, at the very least, a very good approximation to the truth.

So, what makes you a denier and not a sceptic is that you persist in rejecting the conclusion that AGW is real despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that indicates AGW to be the only logical conclusion from the data.

Even YOUR side of the debate no longer asserts this silly absolute.

Who ever did?

So, if you intend no such insult, then simply call the skeptics what they want to be called, “skeptics.”

But to call an AGW-denier a sceptic is false, because it is no longer reasonable to doubt the conclusions that AGW is real. Sure, 25 years ago, it was reasonable to entertain such doubts. But it is no longer. To call an AGW-denier a sceptic would be to falsely dignify the arguments that that denier makes.

Our side of the debate could have given your side a more derisive false lable, like Saviors (used ironically, of course). We don’t do that. We call you warmists and alarmists, which is generally accurate,

Nope.

The terms “alarmist” and “warmist” carry a false connotation of exaggeration (if not of outright falsehood), whereas, if anything, the opposite is true. Many climate scientists have accused the IPCC reports of being too conservative, of toning down the magnitude of the issue in order to make it more palatable. According to some climate scientists, there is a very real possibility that what we have done and are continuing to do to the climate will – in perhaps the next 100 years – have dramatic consequences for our way of life.

Given that this is the best understanding of reality arrived at by a sizeable number (I don’t know how many, but it is more than just a small handful) of the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding Earth’s climate, is it appropriate to call this view “alarmist”?

When there really is a fire, do you call the guy who raises the alram an “alarmist”? No, you don’t.

and implies only the arguments your side makes.

It’s not a question of arguments any more. While the science is far from “settled” – there are many details still being filled in – the evidence has been strong enough for at least a decade to indicate three broad conclusions:

1. Earth’s average temperature is rising;
2. Human activity is largely responsible;
3. From the point of view of human societies, this is a bad thing.

This is not a set of tentative hypotheses, or unsupported theory : these are firm conclusions, supported by almost all of the world’s climate scientists, and supported by a huge range of different types of data. In other words, it is humanity’s best understanding of reality.

As for all the outrage here about Heartland’s stupid blunder (and their use of the logical “guilt by association” fallacy), have any of you expressed any outrage for the exact same behavior by Climate Progress? A year ago, they posted their almost identical smear by comparing “deniers” to Norwegian mass child murderer Andrew Brevik. I did a text search on this thread, and saw not one mention of this inconvenient bit of omission or hypocrisy (depending upon whether or not alarmists were aware of their own side’s extremism). ClimateProgess had that prominent page displayed for a year, and only recently and very quietly removed their insult.

Is ClimateProgress representative of the majority of climate scientists? No. Has it ever been? No. That role is held by the IPCC.

In short, how much does Climate Progress matter? In the broad picture, not very much really.

By contrast, is the Heartland Institute representative of the majority of AGW-deniers? Well, perhaps not any more. Has it ever been? Oh, yes, until (more or less) yesterday.

Heartland was shamed by it’s own side of the debate into pulling down their stupid billboard within days.

This is also wrong. It was “shamed”, as you say, not at all. If the Heartland Institute had been “shamed”, it would have issued an apology. No, instead it was pressured by the publicity generated by the pro-reality lobby, and by pressure applied to the funders of the Heartland Institute, who seem to have realised that, while they seem to be happy to fund anti-reality campaigns, they have no wish to be associated with such blatant crassness.

Simply asserting something does not make it true. Both “denial” and “denier” are perfectly appropriate words. They’re in the dictionary, and their definitions don’t even include the word “Holocaust” (at least Merriam-Webster). If you don’t like the stigma that comes from stubbornly denying a well-documented fact, don’t do it. Whining that some uninformed people may not be able to distinguish global-warming denial from Holocaust denial is like complaining about how people think you’re a flasher because you decide to whip out your junk and urinate on a wall in public.

Read about it here:

Sooooo… a blog post about a Fox News report about a blog post that was factually accurate, if inconvenient? Of course, the fact that Breveik holds many nutty views doesn’t mean that climate change deniers share all of those same (other) nutty views, but at this point we’re about half a dozen degrees of separation from anything approaching a scientific refutation. As Chris Winter says, assertion isn’t enough. Tens of thousands of scientists have worked for decades to compile a huge body of converging lines of evidence. Nitpicking media coverage of an issue doesn’t do a thing to disprove it. If you really believe in good faith that anthropogenic climate change theory is wrong, we’re going to need some evidence (a badly worded public service ad or a single error in a multi-thousand page IPCC report doesn’t constitute evidence).