Denial and Scepticism
When discussing those who doubt (or purport to doubt) the science of global warming, there’s a prevalent view that it’s somehow bad form to refer to them as climate change “deniers”. The reason for this, the argument goes, is that it lines up climate change doubters alongside the morons who claim that Belsen was the Wehrmacht’s answer to Pontin’s, and we wouldn’t want to suggest that well-balanced, sensible people like Melanie Phillips had anything in common with neo-nazi scum now, would we? (Phillips, of course, is barely capable of writing an article that doesn’t compare her own detractors to Stalin, Goebbels, or the Stasi, but we’ll leave that little irony aside for now.) A lot of people who make this sort of argument are deniers themselves, but there are a number of sensible people who believe it as well, the Guardian’s James Randerson being the most recent that I’m aware of. He claims that it “plays into the hands of those who want to convince the waverers that this is purely a political argument”, and that doubting climate change is “in a different category” to doubting the Holocaust.
First, I don’t at all buy the idea that this plays into anyone’s hands. There are a number of fuckwits who claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and can be cured by clean living and the odd garlic and beetroot smoothie, but no one claims that calling them denialists plays into their hands, so what’s the difference? As to the idea that Holocaust denial is in a different “category”, what this is meant to mean isn’t exactly clear. Epistemically, the two seem pretty close. In both cases the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of one side of the argument rather than the other, and as a result consensus among experts on the fundamentals of the topic is pretty much universal, to the point where there really isn’t a debate to be had any longer. Presumably, then, Randerson means that there’s some moral difference between the two. Well, yes, that’s true. The tragic death of millions in the Holocaust has already happened, while most of the deaths that climate change is predicted to cause from ecological devastation, rising sea levels, war over shrinking water reserves and so on are yet to come. So climate change deniers aren’t merely insulting the memory of those who have already died; if their ideas were listened to with any seriousness, it could lead to countless more unnecessary deaths occurring. But Randerson’s mystical category that contained Holocaust deniers and not climate change deniers was meant to be worse, so let’s be charitable and assume that’s not what he meant. The final interpretation that I can think of is that it’s the intentions of the two groups that’s meant to make climate change deniers less bad. Once again, though, the possible motivations are pretty much the same in both cases. Both Holocaust and climate change deniers are either ignorant, misinformed, self-deluded, or they’re deliberately spreading misinformation themselves, possibly because of their massive vested interest (yes, ExxonMobil, that would be you). This “category” idea just doesn’t stack up.
The preferred term that denialists like to use themselves is “sceptic”, and for some inexplicable reason the Guardian has gone along with this, but the climate change deniers’ enterprise isn’t a sceptical one. The sceptic is doubtful by nature, and may well be critical of the claims made by others, but is also open-minded, and willing to be convinced if presented with a sound argument. The climate change denialist movement is neither of those.
Reader Comments
I’m not sure if I can really add anything to this. I agree pretty much entirely with what you say here.
The only real distinction between ‘deniers’ and ‘sceptics’ is that ‘deniers’ are more likely to be motivated by sharing or sympathising with the political viewpoint of the Nazis (and are therefore possibly more ‘evil’ in the normal (thoroughly deontological:( ) understanding of the word) whereas ‘sceptics’ are motivated by a lot of things, ranging from laziness, distrust of the political left/environmentalist to having vested interests in not facing up to the fact that most peoples’ lifestyles may have to undergo radical change in order to respond to the phenomena of climate change – and are so just being willfully ignorant – a charge which is normally considered morally different. Whether this distinction makes a great deal of ethical sense…..is sort of a seperate question.
The people who deny the Holocaust may well be morally worse than those who deny anthropogenic global warming, in any number of ways, but I don’t think there’s a clear difference between the two enterprises, which is what Randerson was claiming. Someone who denies the Holocaust could quite plausibly do so for reasons which are pretty analogous to those that motivate climate change denialism. Someone might deny anthropogenic global warming because the consequences of their accepting it would be too much for them (since it would require admitting free market fundamentalism is flawed, for example), or they might deny it out of desire to mislead people because they worked for an oil company. Equally, someone might deny the Holocaust because they’d been raised by neo-nazi parents who told them that Hitler was a great, sadly misrepresented statesman, and they might not be able to accept that their parents had misled them, or they might do so despite knowing that the Holocaust had happened because they want to make people sympathetic to neofascism.
Part of the letter of Professor Harold Lewis resigning from the American Physical Society :
” The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me. “