When does the propounder of an alternative theory become a denier?
Brian Clegg
Monday, 28 January 2008 09:48 UTC
I’ve recently had an exchange of emails with a respected scientist who has doubts about the validity of some of the science behind the current thinking on climate change. He has been villified as a ‘climate change denier’.
Similarly, I have previously talked to Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson, who has been pilloried because he is prepared to think about issues that other scientists have decided aren’t worth thinking about.
Is this really the right way to go about things? We might think that the first scientist, who holds theories on climate change that most of the community now believe to be incorrect, is not taking in the whole picture, but surely he doesn’t deserve to be labelled the same way as a Holocaust denier? Fred Hoyle clung onto the steady state theory long after most astrophysicists were convinced by the big bang, but that didn’t make him a ‘big bang denier’.
It seems there are certain topics we just aren’t allowed to be scientific about – emotions always creep in. But is this right?
Updated 28 January 2008 09:58 UTC
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Replies
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Good post—I have highlighted it on “Nautilus, our author blog, today”;http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/.
As mentioned in that post, Nature Reports Climate Change and NR Stem Cells were set up in part to provide informed and stimulating, yet not rude, debate and information for other scientists as well as the public in these flashpoint areas.
But it would be good to know what Nature Networkers think about your questions.
For sure, many climate scientists are themselves “vilfified” all over the Internet for their results and models, it is quite an awful way to behave, whoever is doing the vilifying, in my opinion. Decorum is a valued quality. (Or should I write “impulse control”?) -
Sorry ,forgot to “preview” and the link to my Nautlius post does not work in my reply above.
Here it is again. -
Yeah, interesting question. I work on Nature Reports Climate Change and blog on Climate Feedback (hello, Science Writers!) and wanted to throw in a couple of cents.
It’s probably inevitable that scientific discussions become emotional “flashpoints”, as Maxine puts it, when they cross from the even-tempered world of science into spheres where more heated rhetoric is customary – like politics, in the case of climate change. Maxine’s got a good point that climate change proponents as well as “deniers” have been spattered with mud in the process.
And from a journalistic point of view, there’s a real dilemma over how to frame climate science that deviates from consensus – and whose weight relative to the consensus has been exaggerated by people with political motives. Editors at the BBC recently resolved to be more sophisticated in how they represent outlying views on global warming, to avoid creating the illusion of lively debates (see their blog – I found out about this from NRCC editor Olive Heffernan’s reaction post on Climate Feedback). In his book Storm World, the science writer Chris Mooney decided to refer to climate change “skeptics” either with the word “skeptic” always in scare quotes, or as “contrarians” – less accusative than “deniers”, but still reflecting his judgement that their skepticism is far-fetched.
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Sorry, my links didn’t work either! Here they are again –
Climate Feedback blog
Nature Reports Climate Change
The BBC post
Olive’s Climate Feedback post
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