Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
When I used to think about the word skeptic, it was to wonder whether to spell it beginning sk or sc. No longer. Now that AP guidelines have recommended avoiding the term climate-change skeptic, I find myself pondering the differences among skeptic, doubter, and denier. The Associated Press Stylebook editors write, in part,
Our guidance is to use “climate change doubters” or “those who reject mainstream climate science” and to avoid the use of “skeptics” or “deniers.”
The reasoning here is twofold. First, genuine scientists usually consider themselves skeptics; since they don’t find that so-called climate-change skeptics employ “scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” they take umbrage at the term’s being hijacked. Second, the “doubters” take umbrage at the word denier, which smacks to them of Holocaust denial.
I was actually favoring the last term, myself, precisely for the echo it provides. Hit ‘em where they live, I say. Then I looked at comments on a number of “climate-skeptic” sites and found reasoning like this:
I think the goal of ruling out the middle ground is, with that gone, the default position left is the alarmist one as the sceptic [sic] position has been renamed ‘denier,’ and that people don’t want to be associated with that, no matter how valid a position it is, or however correct its arguments are. It’s an entirely political tactic.
Ah, I thought. So someone thinks there is a middle ground. And sure enough, that middle ground is one the deniers (I’m going to use all these terms here, just to see which one suits me best) are very good at laying claim to. Climate change is a theory, they point out. It’s all very complicated. Here are charts, here are graphs. Here’s an idea the scientists had 20 years ago that got debunked. And we don’t know. We don’t deny anything. We just don’t know.
OK. Sheesh. One wants to talk to these people, so let’s begin at a place where we can all breathe.
Here’s the thing about skeptics. They often claim skepticism as inherent to their nature — not surprisingly, since the term originally referred to a whole school of ancient Greek philosophers. They try to be governed as little as possible by belief and as much as possible by rational inquiry. They ask and ask and ask. (Richard Muller, of the University of California at Berkeley, who famously published his change of view, could fairly be called a former climate-change skeptic.) Doubters, by contrast, usually don’t doubt everything. They doubt a particular thing — the Apostle Thomas, for instance, doubting the resurrected Jesus — until evidence or argument convinces them. I think of John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt and recall especially the avenging Mother Superior, who says, stricken, at the end, “I have doubt.” Doubt isn’t always about religious matters — juries are asked to make judgments “beyond a reasonable doubt” — but it seems to me much involved with questions of belief. And since anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, relies on mountains of scientific evidence, I’m a little reluctant to use a term that implies that climate scientists are faithful believers.
Finally, one thing I learned from cruising all these climate-skeptic websites is that few in this camp fail to credit the existence of climate change or global warming. It’s the anthropogenic part that gets short shrift. Just about every other cause is thrown on the table for consideration — sunspots, the Medieval Warming Period, the benevolence of CO2, cyclical variations, the North Atlantic oscillation — but the burning of fossil fuels fails to make the cut. So this camp is not filled with climate-change deniers but with AGW deniers (they like to call themselves lukewarmers), which is an unwieldy mouthful for journalists.
I don’t have a new term to propose, though I have been playing with Nimby-like acronyms, like Paccas (People against Anthropogenic Climate Change Acceptance) or Drages (Denying the Reality of Anthropogenic Global Effects). I also suspect we cannot land on an accurate term without knowing the funding behind these groups that impede our progress in forestalling global warming. In the end, are these opinion-makers truly skeptics, doubters, or deniers? Or are they cynics whose mouthpieces are paid for by the fossil-fuel lobby? If that’s the case, I don’t care what you call them so long as you don’t call them sincere.