Deniers Pretend to be Skeptics. They're Not.

A lot of climate change deniers present themselves as skeptics.  There's a huge difference that is often overlooked.

A denialist is someone who says, "No, the Earth is flat and that's all there is to it."  A skeptic, however, is someone who has done a bit of homework.  A skeptic goes through the process of testing a hypothesis against the evidence.

Earlier this year, physicist David Robert Grimes, offered this in The Guardian:

The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.

Were climate change denialism confined solely to the foaming comment threads of the internet it would be bad enough, but this is not the case – publications such as the Daily Mail, Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch publications give editorial support to this view. Worse still, a depressingly large number of denialists hold office around the world. Australia's Tony Abbot decreed climate change to be "a load of crap", and a sizable chunk of the US Republican Party declare it a fiction. Even in the UK, spending on climate change countermeasures has halved under the environment secretary Owen Paterson, who doubts the reality of anthropogenic climate change, despite the fact the vast majority of scientists say unequivocally that the smoking gun is in our hands.

We've developed an unhealthy tolerance for the denialists, even when they hold high office.  We really don't have time any more for indulging their nonsense.  We have to start treating them as what they are, a malignancy that imperils our future.

On The Daily Show and elsewhere we're treated to montages of the leadership of the new Republican Congress spewing the same talking points: 1. "I'm not a scientist," and, 2. "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" or some other dodge.  No one ever seems to ask a follow up like "Yes, we know you're not a scientist but there are thousands of scientists working for the government you can consult so why don't you know? It's your job to find out.  You're duty bound to know." 

We have to shed our tolerance of denialists in high office.  

Taking Out the Trash

You can tell when the Radical Right, University of Calgary Bitumen-Boosters go into meltdown.  It's when their august leaders, like Prof. Barry Cooper, write stuff like this in the Calgary Herald:

British Columbia is full of “sybaritic scatterbrains,” Cooper wrote, “soft consumers and rent collectors, drinking lattes in the rain. Many believe in spirit bears and water sprites and require grief counselling when trees blow down in Stanley Park.”

What Cooper is exhibiting many will recognize as the second stage of grief in the classical model - anger.   That means he's already passed through climate change denial, seen the writing on the wall.  What remains to be endured by the poor sod will be bargaining, depression and acceptance and then he'll come back to the real world.

Cooper, of course, is the guy who some say "laundered" half a million bucks in charitable donations through the University of Calgary trust accounts to fund climate science denialists like the discredited Friends of Science bunch.

The onset of global warming is tough enough on those who bother to peruse the science and notice the impacts now setting in around the world - the storms, the floods, the droughts, the heatwaves, the displaced, the destitute, and yes, the dead.   We expected these things, sure, but not for twenty, thirty or fifty years down the road.   As James Hansen recently admitted, he got it wrong, he was much too optimistic in his predictions.

So what must it be like for an old hack like Barry Cooper whose reputation is so deeply invested in the voodoo science of climate change denialism in defence of the Tar Sands?   That atrophied lump of grey matter inside his head will now have to endure the remaining stages of the grief process even as he is progressively discredited for his chicanery.   Oh, but it's a road he won't have to travel alone. He'll have plenty of company from the faculty of the University of Calgary and the boardroom of the Fraser Institute and the club chairs of the Calgary Petroleum Club lounge.

And finally these old hucksters will reach the acceptance stage and will reconcile themselves to the world as it is instead of the world as they said it was.   Maybe they'll find the decency to recognize the damage and havoc they sought to create.   Maybe they'll even discern the connection between what they did and the suffering and death around the world.   Or maybe they'll just chew their soft, bland food and call the nurse to fetch a fresh diaper.