Last Wednesday, a Washington Post
article on "the new tone" caught my attention. Discussing conservative distaste for the use of the phrase
climate denier by climate change activists, Andrew Freedman lends unfortunate credibility to their demands that the expression be put off limits:
Blogs like Watts Up With That (known in climate circles as WUWT), which is run by former TV meteorologist [and climate denier] Anthony Watts, helped propel the climategate story onto front pages in late 2009 and early 2010. ...
"I did ask Dr. Trenberth, who is at the top of the climate food chain, to stop using a derisive term. He clearly refused. I also sent him an email offering my forum for rebuttal should he wish. No answer. This speaks poorly for his leadership, it speaks equally poorly for the rest of the climate science community that they haven't asked for him to publicly stop using a term," Watts wrote. "In the climate science debate, the scientists are the leaders, yet they have embraced this word, 'denier' with all of its holocaust connotations. Dr. Trenberth's AMS address using that word six times is the pinnacle of abuse of that word so far." [Emphasis and context added]
Nonsense. If climate deniers don't want to be called
climate deniers then they should stop denying climate science. It's that simple.
But a closer reading of the story shows a troubling rhetorical asymmetry: contrarian language from the left; threats and intimidation from the right. Lawrence Livermore's Ben Santer, a lead author of the 1995 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Second Assessment Report, notes that climate scientists "are being subject to really intolerable nonscientific interference in their work simply because of what they're doing and what they've learned." Death threats keep coming from those egged-on by the climate deniers, but the scientific community should dispense with their most descriptive language to date?
Climate deniers deserve to be intellectually marginalized. Democrats must find uncharacteristic discipline and speak of climate deniers frequently in unambiguous language. Furthermore, they should feel no ethical qualms about doing so. Time and time again, Republican success can be tied directly to the word-choice recommendations of
pollster Frank Luntz. This observation is hardly new. The American left has been wringing its collective hands over Frank for nearly two decades. But rarely do you hear discussions about how to neutralize or replicate this strategy for Democrats.
Let's start with the first possibility: neutralizing the Luntz strategy. This won't work in the short term. The simple fact is that conservatives are not constrained by cries of shame originating on the left. And a focused campaign to inoculate the public against the right's messaging strategies would require extensive research and publicity -- neutralization requires much more than merely pointing out that the GOP insists on referring to the estate tax as the
death tax. No matter how funny Jon Stewart's video montages of him repeatedly saying
job-killing and
government takeover, Boehner's still out there every day saying these things. As PR strategists say, there's no such thing as bad publicity; and the more we talk about death taxes, the more the public believes they actually exist. We would need to look more deeply and talk more openly about why these phrases are deceptive and manipulative. We can do that. But not overnight.
The second possibility -- replicating the Luntz strategy -- is much more promising. The two biggest obstacles are both psychological: Democrats lack the nerve and discipline to adopt the strategy. The former is a matter of perceived ethics; I will spend the remainder of this post addressing the ethics so as to convince others on the left to focus a little more on addressing the discipline.
Freedman argues [emphasis added]:
Simply put, the rhetoric on all sides has been out of hand for far too long, and it needs to be reined in, not only to avoid something horrific - a climate science equivalent to the Arizona shootings - but also because of the damage it's doing to the public dialogue on climate change. At the end of the day, when climate scientists are fearful of engaging with the media or the public, it's the American public that loses out on potentially critical insights into what is happening to the climate system and what would best be done about it.
Of course, this would be true if the debate were about how to ameliorate the climate crisis. It is not.
Perhaps the biggest issue facing the world today is global climate change. Although many analysts believe we may have already passed a
tipping point beyond which corrective measures will have no effect, a large segment of the American right has latched onto pseudo-science and creationist-style attacks couched in the language of "skepticism." As with evolution, the
alternative climate hypotheses are not taken seriously in mainstream scientific circles. Nevertheless these hypotheses are held up as evidence of contrarian viewpoints, amplifying the appearance of scientific doubt to levels unsupported by the facts.
Two rhetorical surrenders on this front would prove fatal for efforts to realistically confront climate and energy issues moving forward: we must never cease pointing to the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting a warming trend; and, perhaps just as importantly, we cannot allow Republicans to frame themselves as mere
skeptics, when they are truly
deniers. They are
atheists not
agnostics. Even the
Skeptics Society accepts the premise of global climate change -- with an eye toward amelioration.
Skepticism is cute. And admirable. Denial, not so much.
But even worse, the claims of rhetorical moral equivalency are vastly overblown. Parallels with
Holocaust denier are accidental and irrelevant. They do not justify the elevation of deniers to skeptics. I should be clear: climate change activists should not make overt Holocaust comparisons, but they also should not back down from their perfectly acceptable use of the term
denier when they make reference to climate deniers. While Nazi references should absolutely be off limits, the expression
climate denier does not make any such references.
But how does
climate denier compare to Luntz-generated phrases from Republicans?
Death panel,
death tax,
job-killing and
job-crushing all
activate extremely negative networks -- networks related to death and destruction. And unlike
climate denier, which only activates negatively charged networks through its association with a similar (but still entirely unrelated)
collocation, the GOP stock phrases activate such networks directly.
But these talking points have one additional property as well:
they are all lies. There are no death panels; the estate tax impacts only a small number of people; and, as the CBO reports, the Affordable Care Act frees workers -- it does not eliminate jobs. On the other hand,
climate denier is a true claim about climate deniers. To decide if
climate denier is a true description, we must look more closely at the nominalized verb
denier. Does
deny make any claims about the truth of its complement? In other words, if a speaker
A is called an
X denier does it unfairly imply that
A knows
X is true, but is lying anyway? The short version is no. In more technical terms,
deny is not a
factive verb. So,
even if you buy the climate deniers' premise that climate science is unsettled (which you should not),
climate denier is a perfectly honest description of climate deniers.
As I've
argued in the past, the only way for progressives to fight the rhetorical dominance of the right is to know exactly where the ethical line is drawn; be unafraid to walk right up to it; and be committed to calling out conservatives every time they cross it. Those who would like society to exist for future generations should use the expressions
climate denier and
climate denial proudly and frequently.
