Stay tuned. As for the climate bill languishing in the U.S. Congress, it was pretty moribund long before ClimateGate. I would also say that the use of the term "denialist" is unfortunate. How about a more neutral word like dissenters. We all know that "denialist" brings to mind those who deny the Holocaust. Its use in this context is, at the very least, an implied ad hominem and does no honor to the writer.
Also, re those "obstructionist politicians," politicians of every stripe know something about "consensus," too. Note this from the Pew Foundation, hardly a right-wing organization: Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming. Good idea to know something about the American political scene before opining on it.
Also, re those "obstructionist politicians," politicians of every stripe know something about "consensus," too. Note this from the Pew Foundation, hardly a right-wing organization: Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming. Good idea to know something about the American political scene before opining on it.
Our chief leader editor, chief news editor and chief magazine editor are all highly experienced US journalists and editors, Frank, well versed in the "American political scene" as you call it as they have spent all their careers steeped in it. (Two of the three mentioned are based in our Washington DC office along with several journalists).
ReplyDeleteI too don't like the word "denialists" very much, but it is well used in other contexts outside the holocaust, eg "AIDS denialists" who refuse to accept the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS. In this context, these armchair critics of scientific research who cherry-pick and quote-mine out of context in both cases, are indeed "denying" rather than "dissenting" in the sense that they don't want to engage with or perform any scientific experiments or analysis, they want to deny that the scientific evidence exists for their own ideological or other personal reasons. So although I don't particularly like the word "denialist" it is certainly more accurate in this context than "dissenters".
(Disclosure: I am a senior editor at Nature, the journal being commented upon here.)
Though I'm in no way qualified to engage with the scientific evidence, I agree that 'denialist' is at best unhelpful and at worst inflammatory. The overall tone of the editorial encourages a good guys/bad guys dichotomy which, as far as I'm concerned, ought to be absent from any such discussions. Ridiculing others is never very fruitful.
ReplyDeleteI can only be dismayed, Maxine, to learn that whoever wrote that editorial was an American. I would never have guessed.
ReplyDeleteI think that "denialist" is inappropriate because it is a weighted term. Its moral implications and connotations are such that it should have no place in scientific discourse. As for the climate debate, I think the point to be inferred from the material leaked from the Hadley CRU is not that global warming has been disproved, but rather that there is more solid ground for dissent and debate than many have been willing to admit, especially those associated with the Hadley CRU. Rightly or wrongly, like it or not, the leader writer should have grasped that doubt has been sown - and sown widely - and no amount of rancorous verbiage is going to change that.
Since I was trained as a scientist, I have to agree with Maxine on this.
ReplyDeleteI'd call Dawkins a denialist, too, for parallel reasons.
The point being, as Maxine says, that they're NOT dissenters because they're not using science to raise doubts about a standing hypothesis, they're using the same kind of cherry-picking to find reasons to support their ideology, in exactly the same way that fundamentalists cherry-pick Scripture to affirm their prejudices, and the same exact way in which fundamentalists tried to write a textbook in support of intelligent design by cherry-picking science data to bolster their arguments.
The fact is, science IS done by humans, which means human bias needs to be worked around, acknowledged, and accounted for in the experimental design.
That the Hadley folks screwed up means that they ought to be called on it. But their screw-ups don't invalidate the other reams of peer-reviewed data and experiments that have been done. They've cast doubt on their results because their methodologies are now suspect. But the questions they asked remain valid, and other scientists have studied those same questions, and achieved similar answers.
So Maxine is quite right, the word "denialist" is certainly more accurate in this context than "dissenters." Genuine dissenters, after all, need to present their own experiments for peer-review, too.
I dissent.
ReplyDeleteFrank is precisely correct. This is a public matter as much as scientists would like to think of it as a scientific matter. And the argument in the article is intended to address those who dissent, not deny.
The tone of the article does nothing to address the reasons why the data was fudged in the first place. That data was fudged, means that the veracity of any presentation of data from anywhere is to be suspect. This may be unfortunate for the community of scientists who get their funding from the government sources, which in large measure are sported by the populace. But to write an article about "denialists", as if name-calling can work in times like these, is not constructive. There may be science to it, but it is misapplied.