Posted on 05/15/2015 5:42:04 AM PDT by HomerBohn
A grass-roots offshoot of a progressive, “social changemaker” nonprofit is petitioning newspapers and other media to begin referring to climate change skeptics as “deniers” by default.
Forecast the Facts, a climate change activism project of a larger nonprofit called the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, argues that media types who use the general term “skeptics” are “misleading the public” on climate change:
Some members of the media are still misleading the public by wrongly using the term “skeptic.” The New York Times, for example, recently called Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) a skeptic — even though he believes that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.”
Scientists should practice and promote scientific skepticism, and encourage informed citizens do the same. But those who reject the facts on climate change are not skeptics — they’re deniers.
That statement comes attached to an online petition that asks signers to agree with an assortment of North American and European scientists (and Bill Nye the Science Guy) in calling for the change.
From the scientists’ (and Nye’s) open letter:
As scientific skeptics, we are well aware of political efforts to undermine climate science by those who deny reality but do not engage in scientific research or consider evidence that their deeply held opinions are wrong. The most appropriate word to describe the behavior of those individuals is “denial.” Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.
As the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard pointed out this week, Forecast the Facts is even petitioning The Associated Press to “Establish a rule in the AP StyleBook ruling out the use of ‘skeptic’ to describe those who deny scientific facts.”
For a variety of reasons, many of the elected officials who have expressed doubt at the efficacy of enacting a costly and aggressive environmental policy would not describe themselves as actual “skeptics” when it comes to the question of whether mankind’s activities have played a role in altering the environment. Some do dismiss manmade climate change outright, while others accept it as a truth.
But what nearly all of them have in common is a shared skepticism of the progressivist rallying cry to get the government involved. A lot of lawmakers who may be “skeptical” of climate change are far more “skeptical” of the politics of climate change, of its policy implications. They’re “skeptical” of whether such change poses the sort of cataclysmic threat that climate eschatologists assure them it does.
They’re “skeptical” of the proposed cost, and the predicted efficacy, of any action mankind might take to curb, or reverse, anthropogenic climate change. They’re “skeptical” of those who seek to mobilize private resources — under the force of law — to solve a “problem” that not everyone agrees is a problem.
Even if there were such a thing as “settled science” when it comes to the phenomenon of manmade climate change, there can be no “settled science” on whether that change is a harbinger only of catastrophe. That part’s interpretive, not empirical.
Except that Forecast the Facts and other climate change activists want to make the interpretive part — especially the interpretive part — empirical. By attempting to draft the concept of scientific skepticism into a service for which it isn’t equipped, Forecast the Facts appears more interested in codifying, once and for all, the ideology of its climate change policy goals into a generally accepted truth.
In other words, it’s about surreptitiously folding opinion into the generally accepted, apolitical definition of a commonly used word — and hoping no one will notice.
The facts keep getting in the way.
More and more people are becoming "skeptical" of these fanatic chicken littles. Truth about decades of falsified data and inaccurate models is throwing ice on their warming scare.
So lets call the current administration “freedom deniers”
I’m a denier of the religion of Global Warming and proud of it.
Call them warmists.
When they inquire what that is, the response is total religious devotion to the concept of global warming. Leave it at that and walk away.
Thanks for posting. Tactics of totalitarians ALERT! (climate skeptic…climate denier…climate terrorist)
I’m a flat earth denier myself...
I think we should start a petition asking the media to start referring to Climate change activists as Climate Change Hoaxsters.
Hurray! I’m now a Racist AND a Denier! Wa-Hoo!
What’s the next pigeon-hole they’ll stick me in? *SNORT*
I usually just refer to these folks as “those in favor of global warming.”
They could ask we be called smelly lecherous kulaks, and the media would gladly comply.
Evoke MAN BEAR PIG!
There is no truth in the idea that human beings effect the climate. Its just not possible, its too big and too many variable!
I said in another post this week that cable channels ran a recent Climate Change movie, sorry the title totally escapes me at the moment, (The Day The Earth Stood Still?), where they show tsunami destroying a large city and worse happening all over the world. They show a triple hurricane. The whole sentiment of the actors was, man really sucks, look at what we did to the earth. There is almost a narcissitic feel to such thinking. The ego of the left is repulsive to be so full of yourself how is there any room for God knowingness?? Hmmmm....
There’s a yawning difference between denial of climate change and that of AGW. Anyone with an operating brain cell knows natural climate change is continually at work; the scam begins with the idea humans are the cause of it.
Is Soros Connected to New Global Warming Website Targeting Meteorologists?
Jan. 25, 2012
Michael Lewis and Anthony Watts write on the Watt’s Up With That? (WUWT) blog that Forecast the Facts partner, Citizen’s Engagement Laboratory — a “non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses digital media and technology to amplify the voices of underrepresented constituencies” — has received funding from George Soros in the past.
Receiving a tip from a reader identified as Jan, Watts — a former meteorologist with 25 years of on air experience who runs the blog as commentary on the “puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news” — along with Lewis, his co-author for this post who holds a Ph.D., show that Soros donated money to CEL and “its projects, Color of Change (CoC) and Presenté.”
(snip)
CEL is co-directed by James Rucker, who co-founded Color of Change with Van Jones in 2005 to help “strengthen Black America’s political voice”.
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical MeteorologistsAccording to the press release, Forecast the Facts was established to “pressure TV meteorologists to inform their viewers about climate change”
(snip)
No thanks.
I’m sticking with “bitter clinger”.
Have ANY of their "models" ever worked? Katrina had seven possible projected patterns from their models and it ended up like none of them. They can't predict weather 5 days out muchless 150 years!
And we are the "deniers"? How about denying the reality that the models don't work!
Climate infidel.
Are any of our activist organizations countering this by pressuring the media to call warmists “hoaxsters”?
Do we have any activist organizations?
I don't know...."bitter denier" has a nice ring to it....
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