A recent Quora post of mine answering a question:
Why don’t we call people who don’t believe in climate change ‘deniers’ instead of ‘skeptics’?
For one reason and one reason only: it is a passive-aggressive ad hominem attack on any one holding that position meant to denigrate the holder of that viewpoint by cleverly associating them in the mind of the listener with holocaust deniers. We all know holocaust deniers are truly nuts (no I’m not being sarcastic, they are) so all we have to do is pluck that “denier” word from that usage and stick it over here to the same effect. You see the term “denier” is not used _anywhere_ else until today except for holocaust denial. We don’t call creationists “evolution deniers”. We don’t call the anti-vaccine crowd “vaccine deniers”… they all get their own separate neutral term. But no, for climate skeptics its “denialism” for you.
Yes there are a handful of nutjobs that say there is no change in the climate or no evidence, but they are the tiny minority. But I suppose its like anything, the small vocal group (islamic terrorist) give a bad name to the whole rest of the group that are perfectly reasonable. The climate question is not monolithic. It’s not simply “climate change” and that’s it. It includes
- Is CO2 increasing? Yes
- Is the temperature rising? Yes
- What is man’s contribution to the increase in CO2?
- What is the contribution of CO2 to temperature change?
- Will the rise in temperature have overall negative, neutral or positive outcomes for humanity? for other species?
- Should humans try to combat the percieved causes of the temperature rise?
- If they do should they do so in an economicaly mindful way (ie spend more to mitigate than the estimated cost of the damage)?
The problem is, you can agree with the establishment viewpoint on 1–6 but disagree on 7, and that makes you a pariah, a denier (just ask Bjørn Lomborg if you don’t believe me)
That is just not helpful. There are a lot of people like me who have legitimate, genuine questions, but they don’t get answered by the climate folk. We’re just told to “shut up and trust us” No. I’m a scientist as well (chemist) and I’m no idiot, I can understand your answers if only you’d bother to engage us actual skeptics who have actual legitimate questions. All I see on TV are climate scientists refusing to even sit in the same room with a climate skeptic. Sad. Thats’ not science, that’s religion, that’s belief. That’s denialism.