I’d prefer ‘climate fatalists’, as their approach is to eschew tough solutions and to let things develop as they will, thus fatalist, and the results of that approach will almost certainly prove fatal to numerous species and possibly to modern human civilization as well.

Speaking of which, why isn’t it in the frame on this website in big numbers?

“The American Denial of Global Warming”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio

Naomi Oreskes, Ph.D.

People are to sophisticated to care about a name. Those against doing something about global warming would just wear the name as an honor. Let them name themselves, of which apparently they haven’t done.

“If you were running national and global climate policy, what level of global CO2 concentrations would be your goal and how would you achieve it?”

This is a great question. I hope everyone here will weigh in on this especially Killian and Mashey and Dano and some of the other “heavy hitters.” ClimateProgress has a remarkably intelligent and successful group of commenters and this is a great opportunity to “kick it up a notch.” Let’s get busy.

Contention over the effects of CO2 is the major obstacle to action. Therefore, I recommend an approach that focuses on replacing carbon fuels. This has a much broader base of support, is the ultimate desired end and will eliminate CO2 emissions perforce. I’ll get specific in a later comment. Until then, I’ll note that technology, both the wide application of the currently available and the development of the new, is not a delaying tactic. It is the only path to success. Without an explosion of technology, the unwieldy, easily corruptible cap and trade schemes and regressive tax plans will serve only to oppress the people.

One (amongst many) advantage of this sort of numeric approach - it could help disabuse the public confusion w.r.t. to the “atmospheric CO2 stock” vs. “CO2 emissions flow”. I think this remains a significant stumbling block to motivating near-term change. People hear “we need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050″ and even if they accept that, there is a natural tendency to hope that means “business as usual” for, say, the next 25 years, and then rapid cuts much later. In fact, because it is a stock problem, not a flow problem, we know that the reduction path is at least as important as the eventual emissions level. By netting out the “concern” to a single concentration/stock number, it could help focus collective efforts and understanding. (The findings of the Sterman-Sweeney paper “Understanding public complacency about climate change: adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter” still unfortunately apply…).

Another advantage of such a metric: It would drive home the global and interdependent nature of the problem… Unlike measures like “air quality index” which can often be mitigated locally, it would be clear that for well-mixed, long-life GHG’s there will be no such option to isolate ourselves…

Like some commenters above, I am not so sure that “delayer-1000″ itself is going to catch on. But I might encourage Joe to even consider extending the taxonomy in his writing - e.g. gambler-550, pragmatist-450, realist-330, etc. Again, the adjectives are potentially emotionally-loaded, and I just toss them out as examples, but I think that adding a number to the descriptor would help reinforce the importance of “concentrations” and cut through a lot of other mumbo-jumbo when trying to interpret what a specific speaker/policy is recommending.

I am not sure what the research says about people responding to these kinds of numeric campaigns… i.e. do they really know what their BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol level, savings rate, etc. “should be”? Do they act on that knowledge? I don’t know, but maybe Joe and JMG are onto something…

realist-280

while ‘optimist’ is

optimist-315

and, IMO, anything above that is

destructionist–XXX

Ronald,
Might not be a good idea to “Let them name themselves”. Think of the problems if they picked Protectors of the Planet or Humanities Last Hope. Just kidding, but it is true that in political contests the winning strategy is to define the other person before they can define themselves.

Sociopaths.

To give one example - our community access TV station played a global warming denialist propaganda piece 47 times in the last 6 months. But I can buy the DVD of Naomi Oreskes’ American Denial of Global Warming talk for 25 bucks, and the local TV folks say that if I bring it in, and we have permission to rebroadcast it, they’ll put it on the air.

But my attempts to contact UCSD-TV to find out if purchasers of their DVDs do have permission to air them, has not gotten any response (at least not one that I’ve received). And I asked Scripps Communications about this and didn’t get a response either.

Can anyone find out whether we have such permissions? Please????

How about Climate truthers.

I was trying to think of a group that is like the deniers and then steal some of what they call themselves. I then thought of ‘911 for truth’ or groups in that ‘industry’ and that they had many similarities to the global warming deniers.

1) They’ll take some innocent fact and twist it to make some seemingly plausible but untrue claim.

The twin towers and building 7 came down not from the fires in the buildings, but from explosive charges set by some government group.

Instead of the Pentagon being crashed into by a jet liner that was flown by the highjackers, it was crashed into by another plane and explosives went off to make it look like a jet airliner did it.

List some of the 911 for truth claims that aren’t true.
List some of the Climate Truthers claims that aren’t true.

2) There was an official commission that looked into the problem, but of course it is untrustworthy and had to be part of the government conspiracy against the people.
The 911 commission for the 911 crisis
IPCC for global warming.

3) Mainstream scientists and others have examined their theories and have largely debunked them.
List group that has debunked 911 for truth. Mechanics Illustrated has done a nice job with the 911 for truth group.
List group that has debunked; IPCC and Realclimate.com for global warming.

This is just a quick list of similarities, I’ll leave it for a professional writer to do a better job with it. I think it should be considered and do what you can with it. Maybe it will stick.

Where are the other images that should be ubiquitous? Where are the artists and computer geeks who could create them? (I think Global Warming Art should have a “round earth” temperature-projections image, but the person I asked about it didn’t respond. (have spam filters developed an appetite for climate-related email?)

This is worth getting off our butts for, isn’t it?

It is interesting to note that biologist confronted with pseudo-scientific attacks on evolution also call their opponents “denialists”. There was some overlap between the usenet communities so I;m not sure if the nomenclature was independently developed.

It is nevertheless the case that anyone dealing with truths they find sufficiently inconvenient relies on a comparable array of tactics to befuddle the sympathetic and ill-informed audience. The use of these tactics, rather than the underlying purpose, reasonably needs a name and “denialism” is a good one.

That said, it may in certain circumstances provide an unnecessary distraction. I have proposed “delusionist” as an alternative term. It has some nice features.

It’s tough to come up with a single word for these people, because their recalcitrance comes from a variety of sources. Some don’t believe because it conflicts with their religious sensibilities. Others simply are too concrete; they can’t follow the thread of scientific abstractions that say because we know A, B, and C, we can predict D will occur. Still others are unconsciously motivated by greed and hedonism–they can’t believe because then they’d have to give up their yacht.

And some are just cussed, sour, contrarian mules. Come to think of it. THAT is the quality they all have in common–stubborness. They simply are consciously or unconsciously opposed to reevaluating their existing outlook.

So I nominate something like the “obstinates,” the “intractables” or the “stiff-necks.” Or maybe “Dead-enders” is best of all.

The Hansen (H) — the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases of all types that is equivalent to 1/1000th of a ppm of atmospheric CO2. So if current CO2e is 420.nnn ppm, then it’s 420,nnn H, where H inexorably rises through time.

I thought about the Keeling curve (and that might be another worthwhile name — Keeling units) and decided that there was some value to letting people see that, while it goes up and down through the year, the downs are never as low year to year …

There’s a good name I’ve heard Don Wuebbles use for people using those tactics - “confusionists”

Joe -
I think “delayers” is excellent in ‘wrong-footing’ the opposition.
http://www.allwords.com/word-wrongfooted.html
It needs some context, without which it might be misunderstood to mean delaying climate change. Those practitioners will claim they’re delaying unnecessary action and so might embrace the name. Perhaps an adjective such as ‘dire’ or ‘dangerous’ could help.

I’d hoped for more along these lines from the Rockbridge Institute but their efforts are infrequent. Joe Brewer sometimes writes about framing and climate. Chipping sharp tools from pieces of mental flint is hard work.

My old friend Vladimir Ilyitch used to call them “useful fools”.