Climate change denialists

Last week John Holdren published an op-ed in the Boston Globe bemoaning the undue attention paid to the tiny group of scientists who dissent from the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The few climate-change "skeptics" with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.

Apparently, he's been receiving a lot of nasty e-mail in response. He's written a short commentary in response to those e-mails, You can find the whole thing at DotEarth, but here's one of his key observations:

Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to "mass hysteria" or deliberate propagation of a "hoax".

In a sentence cut from the op-ed piece Holdren wrote,

We should really call them "deniers" rather than "skeptics", because they are giving the venerable tradition of skepticism a bad name.

Exactly! Hence the title of this post.¹