Climate change denialists = climate change liars : Pharyngula
scienceblogs.com
scienceblogs.com
That said, calling out specific distortions/lies is totally fine. Take away the headline and that's what this post does.
I admit, though, that the headline is somewhat inflammatory. I didn't want to change it for my submission, though, as I felt it would be best to let the author choose the headline.
Somewhere in the middle, there's a mildly interesting discussion to be had, about a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior.
This post doesn't help things at all. It just makes one side (the author's) look a little more crazy and thus a little bit less believable.
Even with small temperature changes there are large projected impacts from changing weather patterns causing drought in some areas and flooding in others. Think of the regular El Niño/La Niña oscillation to see how much small temperature changes change weather patterns. This is on top of ocean acidification which is already damaging coral reefs and could widely threaten all kinds of shellfish (and ecosystems dependent on shellfish) in our lifetimes. And there are small changes in ocean level projected, which have a disproportionately large economic effect because we have so much important commercial activity at the ocean/land boundary.
In truth there is a fascinating discussion to be had about how much and when. There are a lot of open questions and that discussion is hardly one-sided. For instance look at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134721.ht... to see scientists projecting that the projected rate of increase of CO2 due to global warming (yes, increasing temperature releases natural CO2 which increases warming some more) is much less than had been projected. This will push us towards the lower end of what has been projected. Which, contrary to the yelling you hear from climate deniers, is far from nothing, and is not economically unimportant.
In short there is a fascinating scientific discussion going on about significant impacts that are likely within the coming decades. And if you subtract out the yelling on both sides, you might be able to hear it.
Moreover, it is certainly not the case that climate change is "a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior." While one can debate the magnitude of the probable consequences until the cows come home, there is near universal agreement within the scientific community that those consequences will likely be anything but minor.
But if you're going to predict the End Of The World, you need to be careful about how you do it. Because you're competing with a long history of crazy people making the exact same sort of prediction, all of whom were wrong.
So if you want to distinguish Climate Change from Asteroid Impacts, Africanized Killer Bees, Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria, Russian Nukes, Mayan Calendars, and the dozens of other things that we've forgotten about in the last few decades, all of which were set to End The World in the next few years, you'll need to tread lightly.
I'd suggest being the reasonable side of the debate. The one with the facts, research and data. And the one that never resorts to name calling.
Let me add one to your list: Y2K. As we approached the year 2000, a lot of intelligent people noticed a problem, documented how it could adversely affect society and advocated fixing the problem. Millions of dollars were spent, and thanks to those efforts, the problems were almost entirely mitigated (at least, insofar as the general public was concerned-- many annoyances, inefficiencies and strange bugs remain due to the manner in which problems were dealt with). While some people took a religious bent on the problem and started stockpiling food and batteries, we were fortunate in that cooler heads prevailed and dealt with a major problem.
Admittedly, Y2K never even threatened to be as large a problem as climate change is, but my point is that one can list examples all day long of times that society has faced a crisis and overcome it with lots of effort. That doesn't, however, mean that those who originally warned of the crises were wrong.
Anybody with a modicum of common sense realizes the climate is changing. It always has been. It's also painfully obvious that we haven't had good data on world-wide climate for a long period at all -- it's just a tiny drop in a very huge bucket.
There's probably some technical point about the standard of statistical reliability, but, quite frankly, who cares? Either you can state significantly that some decade or two did something or not, and in either case the climate keeps changing and one decade out of countless eons does not much of a measurement make one way or the other.
So for Joe Six-pack the underlying issue isn't there. What's left out of that? That people misquote each other in news media? That slogans and broad, fuzzy statements are used in the public discourse in place of scientifically exact ones?
Is this guy mad because people don't debate climate science in the precise terms he would like? So it's a cheap shot at people who "dumb-down" things in common discourse? Sounds elitist.
Not that it would be any less inflammatory to post these remarks under a headline like "Climate change denialists = climate change idiots".
(FWIW: Count me as someone who is something of a "climate change skeptic". I don't deny that the climate is changing. I just like the comment one of my professors once made: "We are like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going." :-D )
They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.
Most people seem to routinely ascribe evil intentions to whomever they view as "antagonists" for some reason. I don't find that is typically true. This article pretty clearly takes that same position (and you seem to agree with it). I really don't think that is what most people do at all. But taking the position that someone else is being intentionally misleading is a great way to deepen the rift, if that is your goal. If your real goal is to get better information out there, it's a terribly counterproductive thing to do.
I live without a car. In online forums where I talk about my choice to live without a car, it sometimes gets very freaked out reactions from people. People who are in no position to give up their car find my views and my choices very personally threatening. I see no reason to vilify them for such feelings and every reason to do all in my power to not vilify them. In most conflicts, both sides feel the other side "started it". In many cases, no one intentionally started anything. The friction that exists is very often inherent to the circumstance and not indicative of human evil.