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It’s a start. Paul Bain regrets the offense caused by the term denier.
But there’s no mention of the term failing basic English or it’s unscientific nature. The term has been used by professors, M.P.’s, Prime Ministers and national broadcasters, and none of them have expressed even a hint of regret, but we can nonetheless call this a small win. Notch up one for skeptics, but ten for the fog.
Credit to Paul Bain for being one of the only people drawn into that unscientific milieu who has the strength of character to back out, ever so slightly. He has promised to reply to my last email. I look forward to it. Few who claim to be concerned about the planet have the intellectual honesty to even try to defend their work.
The small win here is not so much the correction attached below (though that is useful), but it’s that the internet fray and the questions will have been noticed by other editors and researchers. In the future, a few of those people will be more careful with their terms.
Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers
Paul G. Bain | Matthew J. Hornsey, | Renata Bongiorno […]
Dear Paul,
Thank you most sincerely for writing to reply to my email. Thank you for taking the time to contact Nature, and thank you for the recognition that the term “denier” causes offense.
Do we also agree that the term denier fails basic English, and cannot be defined as a scientific label because you still are unable to say what deniers deny?
“I think if you understood where skeptics were coming from it would help you design surveys that produced useful results. Basic research, like reading what leading skeptics were saying, would seem a bare minimum requirement before designing a study.”
As far as I can tell, I suspect what you feel deniers deny (though you appear reluctant to actually state it) is not any scientific observation, but the pronouncements of the highest authority of climate science (which you deem to be the IPCC).
“I do believe that the technical aspects of this debate should be between climate scientists, as with complex multi-disciplinary issues it is very easy for findings to be misconstrued by non-experts. Whether you like it or not, the majority of climate scientists agree that there is a high likelihood that anthropogenic climate change […]
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.
Please be constructive and polite in comments. 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
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Dear Jo (if I may)
I apologise for my long and delayed response – while I would like to be more succinct, I have to resort to Pascal’s excuse that I’m writing a long response because I didn’t have time to write a short one.
First, an update. As we all know, […]
Dr Paul Bain sent me his second reply to my second letter late on Friday, which I am grateful for. I’ll post it in a few hours (scheduled 9am Monday morning Eastern States time, which is 7pm NY Time). It seemed fairer to let the conversation unfold in business hours, rather than releasing it over the weekend or at midnight.
It’s your chance to help researchers studying skeptics learn more about what we think. — Jo
8.3 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
UPDATE: Dr Paul Bain has replied to say that pressing work commitments mean he cannot respond to this until next week. We look forward to that, and I will make sure it is available for readers here (should Dr Bain permit). – Jo
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Dear Dr Paul Bain,
Thank you for replying (and so promptly). I do sincerely appreciate it. Apologies for my tardiness.
I do still think I can help you with your research. Indeed, in more ways than you realize.
You describe in your Bain et al letter in Nature, that the number of deniers is growing despite “enormous effort”. There is a policy problem. I absolutely agree. No one is having any success getting deniers to believe in anthropogenic climate change. Could it be that they don’t understand deniers at all?
Let’s go through the points in your email reply to me, then the bigger implications.
First and foremost – obviously you did not provide evidence to back up your assumption that the “existence” of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is real. That doesn’t mean it does not exist, but I’ll get back to this. It is the key and only real point.
Secondly, you may regret the […]
In the comments here: E.M.Smith (Chiefio) responded to Paul Bain and then posted it on his own site. It’s very popular (thank you Michael!)
Response to Paul Bain
Dear Paul Bain:
First off, thank you for responding.
FWIW, I am a hard core skeptic. I’m the “target” of your analysis. As such, what folks like me think ought to be particularly important to you. So a bit of history on me and climate change.
I first came to the AGW issue thinking “Gee, this looks important, I ought to learn more about it.” At the Skeptic sites (like WUWT) I had generally kind acceptance and explanation of where I had parts missing from my understanding of the “issues” about AGW and where it was “gone wrong”. At “Believer” sites (an curiously appropriate term as it has all the hallmarks of a religious belief) I would ask simple and innocent questions and largely get derision in return. Simply asking “But doesn’t CO2 have a log limit on absorption effects that we have passed?” or worse, saying “But this article (on skeptic site) seems to have a valid issue.” would bring “Attack the messenger” responses. That, for me, was the first and […]
By Jo Nova
When the formerly esteemed journal Nature endorsed one side of politics in 2020, apparently it didn’t change any votes, but about a third of Trump supporters decided the science it published was politically biased too. The loss of trust in Nature was so strong that it tarnished the whole field of US science. (Zhang et al)
There goes the public faith in peer reviewed “Experts”.
“Trump supporters who had been shown the summary of Nature’s editorial were less likely to trust Nature’s information on COVID-19, and also reported more mistrust in US scientists.”
Being actively political meant 154 years of scientific reputation disappeared just like that. In the graph below presumably* naive Trump supporters ranked Nature as mostly “informed” (marked in orange, of course). The Trump supporters who saw the political endorsement (marked in red) suddenly, apparently saw Nature as more of a partisan rag than an impartial reporter of scientific truth.
@Nature says: In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people’s views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.*
[…]
Stop making sense….
Rebecca Huntley proffers reassurance to the faithful fans of man-made weather. Why make sense when you can just weep your way through national energy policy?
Stop making sense: why it’s time to get emotional about climate change
Rebecca Huntley, The Guardian
It’s a soothing piece of public self-therapy, offering forgiveness to those, like her, that struggle to make sense in the first place. Having lost the debate on climate science, and being reduced to petty namecalling, Huntley’s job, apparently, is to distort what people think science is.
The science behind climate change has been proven correct to the highest degree of certainty the scientific method allows.
Why stop there? Climate change has been proven beyond the highest degree of certainty allowed. It’s gone right off the scale and into the supernatural. It’s a place where 16 year old sages prophesy the future and tell the world to stop floods with windmills.
If you weren’t confused about the definition of climate change, Huntley is here to make sure you are:
But climate change is more than just the science. It’s a social phenomenon
The last thing a prophetic cult needs […]
The first words of the nightly 7pm news Jan 15th:
” The Government tells Climate Change Deniers to stop arguing and accept The Science.”
ABC Prime Time News in Australia this week stooped to abject petty namecalling — claiming those despised climate change deniers are robbing Australia again. In reality, the people robbing Australia work for the ABC. If they only had evidence they wouldn’t need to stomp all over debate.
And in the ABC website:
“Climate change deniers robbing Australia of time to respond to impacts, Science Minister Karen Andrews warns”
Yet the government said nothing that insulting.
…
In other non-news — the Australian Science Minister obediently repeated a twenty year old robot meme that Al Gore invented. Unlike what the ABC headline and wording suggests, it doesn’t appear Karen Andrews mentioned “deniers”. That profoundly unscientific and inflammatory activist term seems to be all the ABC’s. And they call themselves “reporters”?
The formerly esteemed journal Nature did it once, and after I pointed out how unscientific it is, they backed down.
What the Minister for Science said:
Those who are still debating whether climate change is real are wasting time.
[…]
Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.
A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.
Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.
Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as […]
(Click to start voting)
Voting closes on Sunday, and there are lots of great sites to vote for.
I know voting is a bit of an effort, but if you get a lot from a site, it’s a way to say thanks. Awards are useful for bloggers — and it means blogs you like can reach a wider audience.
It’s already a success to be listed and linked as a finalist. Thanks to those who nominated and voted in that round.
For 2015 I’ll be voting for The Pickering Post in Australia-NZ, Steyn Online in Most Humorous, and Breitbart in Politics (though American Thinker is also a great site). I’ll have to choose (darn) between Not a Lot of People Know That, and No Tricks Zone in Europe; Tallbloke’s Talkshop and Climate Audit in Lifetime Achievement and Watts Up and Real Science in Weblog of the Year.
To make your vote count you do need to supply an email, check it, and confirm. See below for instructions if you need them.
How topical is climate science? In the last year 600,000 people visited this site. When Tony Abbott faced a leadership crisis last month his main competitor was an […]
Just another day in a science debate, right?
One side of a scientific theory, are generally bully boys conducting witchhunts, wishing of execution, joking about chopping off heads, and thinks it’s funny to mock explode children of dissenters. This is the same side who wants to force us pay billions to change the weather. They dehumanize their critics with relentless petty names that imply they have no rational brain. When their lauded hero professor can’t convince the crowd with reasoned arguments, he discusses using industrial sabotage and destruction to get the message across. Go blow up a dam to save the planet?
The other side are upstanding scientists.
Pat Bagley, the Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist, has things a little mixed up.
“Anti-Scientists.” A cropped section of Pat Bagley’s cartoon | Salt Lake Tribune
See the full cartoon on CAGLE CARTOONS
Artists used to pride themselves on being a thorn in the side of authority. In the topsy turvey world of “climate science” they instead attack the volunteers fighting corruption and incompetence, and help the industrial green machine, global financial houses, and ever-bigger government (or if you like, respectively the environmental, financial, and political authorities).
Someone should let […]
After skeptical climate science blogs dominated the science category in 2013, the bloggies caved in and dumped the whole category. This is your opportunity to show that scientists are skeptics, and the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers still count.
So in 2014, I suggested we could lodge a protest, or we could just nominate our favorite blogs for other categories couldn’t we? And boy-o-boy, nominate we did. (Thank you.) Skeptical science blogs are now spread across many other categories. (In the end, trying to keep skeptics out may give skeptics more wins. Ain’t that the way?) But voting closes on Sunday, so if you haven’t already done it, please take the time to tick those boxes. I know it’s a chore, but it’s a way you can help bloggers reach a wider audience, spread their influence. It’s also a way you can direct readers to sites you find rewarding that they may not have heard of. It’s also a way you can let the Bloggies organizers know that it’s no accident that skeptical blogs are so popular.
This year I’ve been lucky enough to be a finalist in three (gosh) heavy hitting categories, with some stiff competition.
[…]
The backdown continues. Faced with the ongoing failure of their models, the search rolls on for any factor that helps “explain” why the official climate scientists are still right even though they got it so wrong. The new England et al paper endorses skeptics in so many ways.
The world might warm by only 2.1 degrees this century, not 4c. (Skeptics were right — the models exaggerate). There has been and is a pause in warming which the 95%-certain-models didn’t predict. (The science wasn’t settled.) What the trade-winds giveth, they can also taketh away. If they “cause cooling” after 2000, then they probably “caused warming” before that. How much less important is CO2? Ultimately, newer models are less wrong if they include changes in wind speed, but they don’t know what drives the wind. It’s curve fitting with one more variable.
As usual, the models still can’t predict the climate, but they can be adjusted post hoc with new factors to trim their overestimates back to within the errors bars of some observations.
As I said nearly 2 years ago, Matthew England owes Nick Minchin an apology:
Nick Minchin: ” there is a major problem with the warmist argument […]
[See the concise and updating story of our bet with the US Brian Schmidt here.]
Brian Schmidt offered to bet against Maurice Newman, but what’s interesting is just how startlingly weak and underconfident the bet is.
How times have changed. In 2007 the IPCC seemed to be 90% confident that the world would warm by about 0.4 degrees over the next two decades. Now Brian Schmidt braves up to offer a bet of “anything above zero”. Is he really a sceptic? It appears so.
How much should we pay now to prevent “any warming above zero” in the next twenty years? $4.5 billion a year? How about nothing.
I sent something similar to this to three Australian editors yesterday, unfortunately at least two were out of the office. Holiday season.
As Australia’s largest sceptical climate blogger, I would be delighted to take up Brian’s offer of a bet (made to Maurice Newman).
Here’s the bizarre thing, I’m already a party to one of the largest bets on global temperatures, and would you believe, with a man also called Brian Schmidt? (My husband, David Evans, carved out that bet long ago in 2007, and as it happens, […]
The pursuit of knowledge does not fit well into human institutions, the 9 – 5 regime, career plans, nor the profit motive. Cracks are everywhere. The message grows that science is being exploited and distorted.
Randy Schekman received his Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine yesterday. At the same time he has declared that his lab will not be sending papers to the top-tier journals Nature, Science and Cell because they are damaging science. He calls for more open access papers saying “science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals”
Randy Schekman in the Guardian
“I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.
Chiefly, he points out that the “luxury” journals manage themselves as brand-names, and choose papers for reasons other than their scientific advances. The journals seek […]
I don’t think John Cook realizes how his latest article affects virtually everything else he’s written.
(Repeated on the SMH too.)
How accurate is a book when even the title describes a group of people who don’t exist? Will Cook stop abusing English?
So he finally admits the banal, that there is no rational explanation for calling skeptical scientists “climate deniers” or “climate change deniers”. Bravo. (No one denies that climate changes, or thinks the Earth has no climate.). But this is terminology he uses everywhere, and it describes a group of people that don’t exist. Has he only just noticed?
We think through our language, and when we use sloppy, inaccurate words, we get sloppy inaccurate results. Abusing our language is what people do when they don’t have a rational argument.
Misleading language is de rigueur for Cook. Even the name of his “SkepticalScience” website is the anti-thesis of accurate English. He’s not skeptical of “official science” in the slightest, and with a gaping hole in his logic (see below), not too scientific either.
Look out for the “fake” tag, too. Since when did a representative of a university call another university academic a fake? Since Cook did. […]
When researchers Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer asked geoscientists and engineers their opinion about global warming, they discovered that two thirds of them think that the current warming is mostly due to nature.
They also found out that skeptics are scientifically informed and in positions of power and influence. What they didn’t figure out is why this is bleedingly obvious once you start with correct assumptions. Even though the skepticism of well respected scientists matches the skepticism of meteorologists (think about that) the researchers assume the skeptics are “deniers”.
Of course, polls of scientists are not evidence about our climate. But it is evidence that one of the main forms of argument “97% of climate scientists say man-made warming is real” is not just meaningless, but misleading. It’s PR, not science. The endorsement of “science associations” is one of the main points of “evidence” offered by pro-carbon-market activists. But few of those associations ever asked their members, their endorsement is usually just a committee pronouncement from six networking types on the “climate policy” committee. And few researchers even ask “most scientists” what they think. The one large survey was done by volunteers (and done twice) and they found […]
CATA have organised a protest
ELECTION NOW!; WE’VE HAD ENOUGH RALLY 10 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]
According to Greenpeace its an “epic fail”. WWF says its a “colossal failure”, and it’s so bad, Oxfam want to start all over again. That news may sound good to the free citizens of the West, but that’s only because we aim so low.
They may not get as much as they aim for, but they will still get what they came for.
Rio 2012: How big is this junket?
[It is] “billed as the biggest UN event ever organised. This time, 15,000 soldiers and police are guarding about 130 heads of state and government, as well as ministers and diplomats from 180 countries and at least 50,000 others.”
The Guardian
So 50,000 people got a trip to Rio. They may want world peace, free energy, and control over your light bulbs, your car, and your wallet, but most of them still got an expenses paid ticket to the Olympics of Global Bureaucracy. In the end they may say they are disappointed, but in reality they still scored one heck of a free lunch. And this is the point. As long as the masses are not saying that they want their money back, the show […]
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