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Comment by jaap_w | Hacker News Reader

That small margin of uncertainty will keep the global warming denialists alive. In the coming days we will hear several myths from them about global warming. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6456476

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"Denialists"? You couldn't have found a more polarizing term for people with differing opinions? I mean we have to get the hate mongering up to a higher level, "denialists" just seem way to soft for these sub-people.

Over the past several years, I've had discussions with a number of people about anthropogenic climate change and global warming. A number of people that disagreed with anthropogenic climate change were adamant that a number of scientists had decreed that the world was, in fact, getting cooler. I asked them for sources, and several sources were put forth. In every instance, the sources they provided were in agreement that the world was, in fact, getting warmer (I'm not sure of any scientist that would say otherwise when looking at the past 150 years). The sources they provided were arguing against the anthropogenic causes, not that the world wasn't getting warmer. This is what I would call "denial"--when the facts coming from their own sources are in direct contrast to their own beliefs.

Furthermore, when confronted with compelling evidence that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are the result of the burning of fossil fuels, not natural emissions of carbon dioxide (such as algae blooms, volcanic activity, or the thawing of carbon trapped in ice), they continue to argue that the CO2 levels are not due to human activity. The compelling evidence comes from carbon isotope analysis--C14 levels are consistent with atmospheric conditions from some 60 million years ago, ruling out recent biological releases and releases from trapped ice, while C13 levels rule out sources from volcanic activity. Both are consistent with output resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. This, to me, is a case of cognitive dissonance--when facts are in direct conflict with strongly held beliefs, cognitive dissonance can lead to a denial of said facts. This is another case of "denial".

Here's another fine example: http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/findings-detailed.php

This obviously biased site conducted a survey of how well the peer-review in the previous IPCC report was. They claim it got an F, but when you look closely, all the chapters on the science of global warming got all A's and B's. It's the "what are we going to do about it" that gets the failing grades.

But by presenting their results backwards, your first impression is going to be that the report is really bad.

>A number of people that disagreed with anthropogenic climate change were adamant that a number of scientists had decreed that the world was, in fact, getting cooler. I asked them for sources, and several sources were put forth. In every instance, the sources they provided were in agreement that the world was, in fact, getting warmer (I'm not sure of any scientist that would say otherwise when looking at the past 150 years).

Wait, what? Whether the world is "getting cooler" or "getting warmer" depends entirely on the timescale you choose to look at. On a million-year scale it's "getting cooler" - it was warmer 5 million years ago than it is today. It is also "getting cooler" if you look at a much shorter scale, say, over the last decade. Are you sure they weren't talking about one of those?

Here's the (cooling) trend for the last decade:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/last:120/plot/ha...

(the woodfortrees index combines several standard data sources into a single static metric; it is calculated as: mean(GISTEMP-0.35, HADCRUT3VGL-0.26, RSS-0.10, UAH).)

I think the problem is with your terminology. To say we've gotten warmer implies it happened over some specific (albeit unspecified) measured timeframe. But to say we're getting warmer implies it's happening right now. In theory we could switch from getting warmer to getting cooler in a single year. There is no objectively preferable time window to judge it. You're free to prefer 30 years or 150 years, but that's an arbitrary choice - the fact that you can find some windows over which warming has happened doesn't mean warming is happening now.

There's no inconsistency between believing "it has gotten warmer" and "it's not currently getting warmer". If they claimed the latter and you looked for evidence of the former, you haven't even shown a contradiction, much less "denial".

Saying "I'm just going to ignore scientific consensus because it suits me to do so" isn't an opinion.

Now we're getting somewhere! If an opinion is not equal to scientific consensus, then it's simply not an opinion. Great stuff. We still need a better expression to derogatorily generalize these people though. "Climate-kook" maybe? That's catchy and dismissive, still not entirely sure it's hateful enough though.

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