Mann vents

Michael Mann has a letter in the Star-Tribune mainly discussing his conduct over the Soon and Baliunas affair and the use of the word "denier".

Read it here.

Comments

[Roger D.]

@Dung (re. Amazon review)

Actually it gets worse:

"Prof Mann [...] said the statistics used in his graph were correct.
"I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand." "

(From the Congressional Hearings):

MR. BLOOMFIELD. Thank you. Yes, Peter Bloomfield. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais

[Latimer Alder]

In case you guys haven't seen it yet, CA has a very interesting discussion of further legerdemain by Mann and cronies.

http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/#more-11632

Plenty there for Dung to get his very persistent teeth into...If indeed teeth is what Dungs use... :-)

[James P]

"Readers interested in the truth behind the science, rather than the falsehoods and smears perpetuated by people like Havanac, should consult the scientist-run website realclimate.org or scientifically based books on the topic like my 'Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming'."

Modest as ever.

[sunderland steve]

Dung:
Maybe some one "stole" his memory as well!

[anonym]

Don Pablo:

First, here is the missing 1988 citation for the first paragraph, from the San Jose Mercury News. While we're at it, here's the full text of Pimm and Harvey's 2001 review of The Skeptical Environmentalist, thanks to the increasingly omnipresent Stephen Schneider.

All the references you give come from the 1990's and later, and clearly derived from the earlier use, typically for the emotional impact.

I'm not sure whether you mean all the references I gave in general, or all the references I gave that specifically contain the word 'denier' (or for that matter 'denialism') and not simply 'denial'. I have assumed the former; the latter is answered below in any case.

All of the examples from the first paragraph seem to refer to psychological denial and not to Holocaust denial in the David Irving vein, some very clearly so. I don't see how you can dispute this interpretation of the 1990 New Internationalist piece, for instance. I reaffirm that the earliest Holocaust-denial analogy I am aware of is either Gelbspan's "campaign of denial" in 1995 or Pimm and Harvey in 2001, depanding on how you interpret things. And a reality check is in order here. "Psychologisation" has been very popular over the last few decades as a means of explaining the political beliefs of those you disagree with, and especially popular among the political constituencies which tend to be attracted to CAGW advocacy. Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality and so on. And surely the most convenient and obvious psychological (or cod-psychological) explanation for CAGW disbelief is as denial in the Freudian sense. So it would be pretty surprising if no-one had thought to "diagnose" CAGW disbelievers as being in denial.

I am a psychologist, and the term "denier" is not a psychological term.

I am aware of this. Here is an interview with a sociologist about "The Psychology of Climate Change Denial" from last December's Wired, and George Marshall's reflections on the same subject in the 9 March 2009 Guardian. Here is the official press release for the conference mentioned by Marshall. It declares that "Facing Climate Change is the first national conference to specifically explore 'climate change denial'." Marshall himself was a keynote speaker. So, first, denial, in the psychological sense, is at least as popular as it ever was as an explanation of CAGW disbelief. Again, this is what we would expect: why give up on such an easy and appealing explanation? Certainly not because another appealing interpretation happens to have a similar name.

Next, look at the subheading of the Guardian article. Someone - I presume a Guardian subeditor, but maybe Marshall himself - has used the word 'deniers' to describe those who are (putatively) in psychological climate-change denial. It's not as if the subeditor was disserving Marshall &emdash; check out the number and variety of uses of 'denier' or 'deniers' in his blog about "the psychology of climate change denial". And naturally the comments on both the Wired and Guardian articles use 'denier' or 'deniers' without pause, as did the person who Dugg the Guardian piece. And then there's New Scientist's "Living in denial" special report from this May, which ticks almost everything on the bingo card except a clear Holocaust-denial analogy. So, second: the language for Holocaust denial ('denial'/'denier'/'denialism') is now being employed indiscriminately to allege both climate-Freudian-denial and climate-Holocaust-denial, and it seems that the two concepts themselves are being blurred together to an increasing (though variable) degree. (Again, Gelbspan's The Heat Is On book seems to have been ahead of its time in using 'denial' to refer to both other-deception and self-deception without marking the distinction.)

This is of course a pretty notable development, especially since one never seems to hear actual Holocaust denial (again, in the standard sense of Irvingesque lying-about-history) explained or understood in terms of psychological denial mechanisms. Nonetheless it is once again pretty much what we would expect, mainly since there's no obvious pleasure or profit for CAGW advocates in striving too hard to keep the concepts separate. At the start of the Wired interview, for instance, the sociologist (Kari Norgaard) does distinguish between disinformation campaigns and her chosen topic of self-deception, but the commenters on the article (from both sides) still took it for granted that she was talking about 'deniers'.

[anonym]

A May 18 comment by Vinny Burgoo on Roger Pielke Jr.'s blog comes to roughly the same conclusions as me. Burgoo did catch something I missed though: John Vidal's 8 August 2001 "Eco soundings" column.

Exxon/Esso, the company thought by some to have eaten George Bush's brain, is more than just an oil giant and denier of global warming.

This is significant not just because it may be the earliest 'denier' and because it predates the publication of Pimm and Harvey's review, but because it predates the September 11 cultural watershed too. I'm pleased to report that Nature is still in pole position for earliest explicit Holocaust-denial analogy though.

A bit of extra squelching around inside the Guardian turns up two other fairly-notable finds: 7 March 2002's "Denmark gives green post to global-warming denier" (by Andrew Osborn, about Lomborg of course - a rare pre-2004/5 MSM find) and the 3 November 2004 leader "And yet it melts" (where the editorial voice takes up 'deniers', crowing earlier efforts by GM and our Pol).

[anonym]

crowing earlier efforts

Gah, crowning of course.

[Muhammad Alaudin Irsyad]

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