I’m pretty sure my first article on debates over what language to use to gain public and policy traction on climate change was this one on Dot Earth in 2008.
If only your effort in 2008 to change the language had been successful.....
I was dragged into the fray about that time by my students who kept referencing Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and the ensuing and escalating dystopian headlines. My graduate field biology and love of nature, and my evolutionary biology studies with a time frame of millions of years was no match for the crisis narratives that were capturing the liberal media, and the fundraising appeals of all my favorite environmental organizations- WWF, an early casualty, then Audubon, and finally Nature Conservancy. Teaching climate science, my emphasis on observation, measurement, data, and scientific method, was no match for consensus science based on the "evidence" of models.
The liberal media, my liberal media, had heeded Al Gore's claim that climate crisis was no longer a matter of science, but of morality. The United Nations quickly joined that view. This media, my media, was promoting a binary understanding- that if you criticized consensus science, you were called the ridiculous term, a "climate denier". NYT, WAPO, and their copycats were beginning to sometimes call any such criticism, a crime against humanity. Some of us, unhappy with the binary promotion and its implications for climate science, began to call ourselves" luke warmers", acknowledging the actual data of global warming and climate change, but critical of the exaggerations and substitution of scary and unlikely models for actual scientific evidence. Many friends and family, seeing only the false binary promotion of their media, began to think of me and the climate scientists I most respected, Drs. Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr., as a climate deniers.
What has happened with climate blogs over the last 15 years is telling. Around 2008, I began reading those early climate blogs- Skeptical Science, What's Up With That, and Real Climate. This was before the more scientifically rigorous blogs, my favorites, Science of Doom, and Climate, Etc. appeared. I've learned from reading the above climate blogs and many others, and watching so many of them become partisan battlegrounds in a hateful morality play, what W.H. Auden wrote in his famous poem, "Sept 1, 1939", "those to whom evil is done, do evil in return". Yes, the promotion of a binary understanding and the resulting labeling of one side as criminals against humanity is more than scientific malfeasance. It has energized that side to also exaggerate, blame, and demonize. I've watched thousands of former non-partisans, for example, Anthony Watts of WUWT, who I remember writing years ago," I often vote for Democrats", become bitter after years of being ridiculed and scorned. I've watched thousands of those posting there and on other "skeptical" blogs show the same contempt for their critics that they themselves have long received.
Science is the loser. Civility is the loser. Crafting helpful bipartisan policies to lessen climate change is the loser. When Trump won in 2016, based on just a few thousands of votes in several states, I thought back to all those thousands of posts on WUWT and elsewhere by people demonized by the liberal media who had become new enemies of the Left. As November 2024 approaches, I continue to wonder and fear that it might happen again.
It's based on a poll. A poll concludes that people like things the way that they are, and they are used to "climate change," which is a terrible name developed by a Republican strategist to downplay the dangers. He succeeded! That is why we need "climate crisis."
It's a fiction that "climate change" was created by a GOP strategist, Lloyd. Did Republican strategists lobby the IPCC to call itself a panel on "climate change" in 1988? In fact, some naysayers have claimed the opposite, that activists shifted from "global warming" to "climate change" to address the variable outcomes around a complicated planet. It is not just a poll. Lots of social science studies are done by offering thousands of people different formulations of phrases to assess subsequent choices. Show me any evidence of an impact from The Guardian turning up its guitar amps to "11" (as in Spinal Tap) and I'll write abvout that too. :)
Andrew,
If only your effort in 2008 to change the language had been successful.....
I was dragged into the fray about that time by my students who kept referencing Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and the ensuing and escalating dystopian headlines. My graduate field biology and love of nature, and my evolutionary biology studies with a time frame of millions of years was no match for the crisis narratives that were capturing the liberal media, and the fundraising appeals of all my favorite environmental organizations- WWF, an early casualty, then Audubon, and finally Nature Conservancy. Teaching climate science, my emphasis on observation, measurement, data, and scientific method, was no match for consensus science based on the "evidence" of models.
The liberal media, my liberal media, had heeded Al Gore's claim that climate crisis was no longer a matter of science, but of morality. The United Nations quickly joined that view. This media, my media, was promoting a binary understanding- that if you criticized consensus science, you were called the ridiculous term, a "climate denier". NYT, WAPO, and their copycats were beginning to sometimes call any such criticism, a crime against humanity. Some of us, unhappy with the binary promotion and its implications for climate science, began to call ourselves" luke warmers", acknowledging the actual data of global warming and climate change, but critical of the exaggerations and substitution of scary and unlikely models for actual scientific evidence. Many friends and family, seeing only the false binary promotion of their media, began to think of me and the climate scientists I most respected, Drs. Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr., as a climate deniers.
What has happened with climate blogs over the last 15 years is telling. Around 2008, I began reading those early climate blogs- Skeptical Science, What's Up With That, and Real Climate. This was before the more scientifically rigorous blogs, my favorites, Science of Doom, and Climate, Etc. appeared. I've learned from reading the above climate blogs and many others, and watching so many of them become partisan battlegrounds in a hateful morality play, what W.H. Auden wrote in his famous poem, "Sept 1, 1939", "those to whom evil is done, do evil in return". Yes, the promotion of a binary understanding and the resulting labeling of one side as criminals against humanity is more than scientific malfeasance. It has energized that side to also exaggerate, blame, and demonize. I've watched thousands of former non-partisans, for example, Anthony Watts of WUWT, who I remember writing years ago," I often vote for Democrats", become bitter after years of being ridiculed and scorned. I've watched thousands of those posting there and on other "skeptical" blogs show the same contempt for their critics that they themselves have long received.
Science is the loser. Civility is the loser. Crafting helpful bipartisan policies to lessen climate change is the loser. When Trump won in 2016, based on just a few thousands of votes in several states, I thought back to all those thousands of posts on WUWT and elsewhere by people demonized by the liberal media who had become new enemies of the Left. As November 2024 approaches, I continue to wonder and fear that it might happen again.
It's based on a poll. A poll concludes that people like things the way that they are, and they are used to "climate change," which is a terrible name developed by a Republican strategist to downplay the dangers. He succeeded! That is why we need "climate crisis."
It's a fiction that "climate change" was created by a GOP strategist, Lloyd. Did Republican strategists lobby the IPCC to call itself a panel on "climate change" in 1988? In fact, some naysayers have claimed the opposite, that activists shifted from "global warming" to "climate change" to address the variable outcomes around a complicated planet. It is not just a poll. Lots of social science studies are done by offering thousands of people different formulations of phrases to assess subsequent choices. Show me any evidence of an impact from The Guardian turning up its guitar amps to "11" (as in Spinal Tap) and I'll write abvout that too. :)