TBYJ: I know that you see things that aren't there, like my sockpuppet SandyS. That part is pretty amusing. But I apologise for attributing your declining my invitation to have lunch to a lack of guts. All I will say is that it's a great pity you have such trust in your ability to judge someone, in such a negative way, without first taking advantage of this obvious and low-cost way of double-checking. One might almost call it an audit :)

You never said it but the allusion was unmistakeable. And it's striking you didn't correct us right away when we started to make fun of the idea. Calling this a vanity thread though is despicable. Not because I have no ego or vanity but because this is a sincere attempt to grapple with something of the utmost solemnity which you are doing your best to trivialise. Which brings me to geronimo:

What would victory look like for you?

Very good question. Here are three levels:

1. Alarmists stop using the term denier completely
2. If not 1, they lose all credibility with the public because of this gross abuse of language
3. If not 2, the term doesn't trigger a genocide, as some would wish.

Strong statement but that's been one of my concerns, articulated to a close friend in 2009, after explaining the Yamal shenanigans to him, not long before Climategate broke, which happened to be on my birthday. Denier has always struck me as that bad. But I've also taken great encouragement, often through the labours of others, on the possibility of escaping the worst (as I think we all have, however gloomy or chipper we start out as) since 17th November 2009.

Please lose the personal insults, Hilary, and I would be delighted to have you involved.

SandyS:

Interesting the amount of hostility this has caused. Would Eugenics, lysenkoism, The Spanish Inquisition and the ethics of ECT [have] had the same reaction if not why not?

Another good and difficult question. I won't attempt the comparatives. I haven't read details of torture during the Inquisition, though I know they are awful, an insult to the one who cried "Father forgive them" when he himself was tortured and killed right at the outset. (A plea the church was hasty to forget in their abysmal attitude to the Jews for many centuries.) And of course the believers in the settled science of thermageddon in the 21st century don't draw their hateful analogies for those who question them from ancient horrors, or the more recent alternatives you mention, but from the Shoah.

There are though two expressions - almost cliches - that I think are worth considering as we review progress (or lack of it) so far:

1. Shooting the messenger
2. Blaming the victims.

Of these the second is by far the most important. But it is noticeable that, despite all the talk of how terrible it is to deny the Holocaust, if you actually quote just a small amount of the detail of what went on you are at once accused of terrible sins yourself. I expected this though I have to admit I didn't expect so much initial stupidity - I thought that would come later! (This is why Barry Woods detecting self indulgence on my part was exquisitely wrong. Stubbornness maybe but self indulgence, vanity and the desire for a quiet life were not the main drivers, of that I can assure you!)

Blaming the victims is still going strong and is by the far the most important of the psychological/social flaws we exhibit in trying to process such terrible atrocities. I believe Nicolas Anelka should have been banned from playing football for life on Thursday, not just for five games. Just look at the smug expression on the face of another recent performer of the quenelle on the railway line outside Auschwitz. Just another manifestation of blaming the victims. And note that real denialism has that smugness precisely because of the deniability that comes built in with it. "It's not anti-semitic, it's anti-establishment." Yeah, right. We are used to such Stokesian gambits throughout the CAGW game, including from Michael Mann, who resolutely denies any link (the verb is unavoidable) between his frequent use of the denier label and the holocaust variant. But Mann knows very well that this is where the term gets its deadly power, both to offend and to deceive. Its use must stop.

David Conn has done an excellent summary of the non-sequiturs in the Anelka verdict in Credit to FA over Nicolas Anelka's quenelle but system could be better in the Guardian in the last hour.

Here's where I want to get to with this thread. I don't know by when. These go back to my intro to Global warming Nazis:

1. The deleterious effects of 'denier' on the climate debate
2. Limitations and dangers of the Roy Spencer approach
3. Limitations and dangers of the Andrew Montford approach
4. Respect, as ever, to Dr Richard Lindzen
5. A new analogy with the Holocaust debate
6. Any other business, like how we put an end to 'denier' forever.

Questions and comments now, during, at the end or not at all? Any of the above is fine.

The deleterious effects of 'denier' on the climate debate

I want to return to the interaction with 'Brendan H' in the 'Global warming Nazis' thread here, here and here. These are the relevant excerpts.

Brendan H:

But on thinking further about this issue, I’m now uneasy about making the comparison between climate denial and Holocaust denial, so I withdraw that claim. And of course, the moral culpability in the two cases is not comparable.

There’s a couple of oddities about this episode, though, in that Spencer is by no means the first climate sceptic to use the N word and its variants; and that climate sceptics seem to regard denial as a worse offence than the perpetration of the original act.

Richard Drake:

Where's your evidence for the second oddity?

Brendan H:

The evidence is primarily the different way the two epithets are handled by climate sceptics, and specifically some blogs:

• The outrage and indignation of climate sceptics over the term ‘denier’ versus the easy acceptance or outright cheerleading for the term ‘Nazi’ and variants

• Explicit banning of a particular word (‘denier’) on Watts Up With That, probably the most-read climate sceptic website, while other terms are relegated to ‘other detritus’

• The quick recourse to the Nazi theme (see: The Merchants of Smear, WUWT) when it suits a polemical purpose.

These sorts of actions and reactions show a blunted sensitivity to the difference between the two terms: one of them denotes a group that engaged in genocide, the other denotes people who engage in post-hoc denial. The two terms are not at all equivalent.

Despite this apparently polished answer I consider Brendan H's claim that 'climate sceptics seem to regard denial as a worse offence than the perpetration of the original act' as another outrageous smear. I hope anyone reading this thread so far would have realised that the original act of mass murder and humiliation of whole peoples is far and away worse in all our minds than 'secondary effects' such as denial today. The confusion I think arises because:

a) the Nazis had a long history as a radical political movement before the Holocaust began - indeed many of us think that it's from that earlier history that there may be most to learn about the climate scene at the moment

b) the Nazis did many other things apart from the perpetrating the Holocaust, such as suppressing free speech, though the Shoah was the nadir and can justly be seen as the culmination of all else.

I'm not going to argue this further right now but I utterly repudiate BH's accusation, even as I strongly support (for example) Anthony Watts over The Merchants of Smear. But it's also right that all this should be examined in the minutest detail. And I'm about to sound a warning or two myself about the approaches to 'denier' taken by Roy Spencer and by Andrew Montford, despite my strong support for both. Moral and linguistic minefield doesn't even come close.

Not central to this thread but I consider it very good news, in the last hour, in the fight against real 'denialism': Nicolas Anelka 'terminates' contract with West Brom

That's disgusting diogenes. You know I didn't say that. By trying to make this about me, we can only assume you're upset that I'm glad that someone who made an anti-semitic gesture (in a game I was watching with my son) and received a very light punishment has now succeeded in making a total fool of himself and, I assume, ended his career in Premier League football in England. Exactly what should have happened in the first place.

By all means be open about your support for Anelka or any other opinion you have on the matter but don't hide behind snide remarks as if that constituted real debate about something this important.

No, the context of 'denier' is an attempt to close down debate, through wholly inappropriate allusion to Holocaust deniers. 'Global warming Nazis', as proposed by Spencer, refers to this illiberal approach to criticism or even basic transparency, that the Nazis were guilty of long before they became mass murderers. Spencer also links the term to the many millions of the poor that have died, and are likely to die, as a result of policies advocated by those using the 'denier' label. As I've made clear I think that makes his arguments more powerful. But I'm coming on to limitations that have to apply.

As to the rest I am particularly grateful for your use of 'observation' instead of accusation. On this of all threads. Very helpful. But I'm going to have to come back to that - probably Tuesday, not before.

Meantime, in replying to diogenes, at 12:07, I didn't have the presence of mind to check the latest from the BBC on the Anelka affair. Ten minutes before they'd put up West Brom sack Nicolas Anelka for 'gross misconduct'. Exactly what I had in mind - and nice to see before I turned in.

You have a clever way with words strangely devoid of humanity - in an area that cries out for both precision and compassion. I want to return to your extraordinary move on 25th February:

But on thinking further about this issue, I’m now uneasy about making the comparison between climate denial and Holocaust denial, so I withdraw that claim. And of course, the moral culpability in the two cases is not comparable.

There’s a couple of oddities about this episode, though, in that Spencer is by no means the first climate sceptic to use the N word and its variants; and that climate sceptics seem to regard denial as a worse offence than the perpetration of the original act.

I've dealt with why the reasoning in the last paragraph was wrong. Now let's observe that:

1. at moment one you agree not only with the term climate denial but the comparison with Holocaust denial it implies

2. at moment two, without apology, you no longer think the comparison with Holocaust denial is valid but you still use climate denial and you at once smear climate sceptics in a quite different way: that we consider Holocaust denial a worse offence than the perpetration of the Holocaust itself.

And nobody picks you on this, apart from me. Reminiscent of the Middle Eastern mullahs who one moment praise Holocaust deniers, because the Jews have exaggerated the whole thing. The next they're praising Hitler for managing to kill so many Jews. Completely incompatible views - unless the whole aim is to denigrate and hurt the victims, whatever it takes.

Similarly, on the football terraces of the UK, there are those who say the Yids exaggerated the whole thing. The next moment, when my own team, Spurs, chant in defiance 'We are the Yid army' (gentiles like me included, remarkably), they make hissing noises to denote poison gas being released into the gas chambers. As Shub said so well:

That's exactly what the abusers want - to abuse, and your own license to abuse.

And once that license has in effect been given - by decent-minded sceptics not registering sufficiently strongly our contempt and non-acceptance - any stick, however inconsistent with the last one, is used to beat us. Thanks for the example.

TinyCO2:

Richard, the reason why your thread is over the top is because being called a denier is not necessarily the first step to our becoming victims of genocide.

Happily this means that the thread is not over the top as it nowhere makes that claim. When for example Geronimo asked me what winning would look like in this area I gave three levels, in decreasing order of desirability, and in all three current use of 'denier' did not lead to genocide. This happy news presumes though that sceptics have faced this horrible ingredient of the climate debate in the right way. Given the stakes involved that, I think, may still be worth discussion.

Nick Cohen writes in the Guardian today (h/t the Bish at top right of page):

David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend

All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can't call us "global warming deniers " because "denier" makes us sound like "Holocaust deniers", and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.

Nick's Jewish of course. Before seeking to unpick what he writes two more fundamental points:

1. I fervently accept his right to say it as he sees it
2. We need at least one thread like this to think through such justifications for 'denier'.

I remember seeing Nick, a writer I admired, at the James Delingpole - George Monbiot debate at Free Word in December 2009, just after Climategate broke. I was both shocked and saddened at how angry he obviously was about people like me who doubted climate science and (above all) policy. In a way I'm glad he's spelled out how sure he is of 'the truth'. I'm sure we'll come back to it.

I wrote about that event at Free Word on Climate Audit in January 2010:

This came out in the UK to a degree that surprised even me in a packed auditorium with a number of famous journalists and writers present at Free Word, London base for the literary great and good concerned with freedom of expression across the world. (For example the excellent Libel Reform Campaign to rectify the UK’s terrible laws in that area.) This was the chosen venue for the debate on Climategate between George Monbiot and James Delingpole on 3rd December. Strictly the debate wasn’t about Climategate but about whether it is ever justifiable to liken AGW sceptics to holocaust deniers, as Monbiot had once done in print (and for which he offered a limited apology, is about the best one can say) – but it soon got broader.

I set the scene a little more than I have before partly because I think I still haven’t fully processed all that went on that night, good and bad. I did refer to one of the worst moments the next day on Climate Audit. During questions from the floor someone behind me astounded me by seeking to justify the perverting of the peer review process, as he admitted had gone on at CRU, in order to get people to act, because this would save so many millions of lives in the end. The other side of the coin inevitably being making criminals of those old-fashioned enough to oppose this kind of thing.

I was grateful that Monbiot at once distanced himself from this suggestion. But, if I’m any judge of an audience, there were far too many who were sympathetic. Which is the kind of thing Matt is talking about I think.

The atmosphere has changed radically in the UK since 3rd December but it’s worth being aware where some of the opposition are willing to let their logic take them.

All power to Steve’s emphasis on due process, at Matt says.

I was partly thinking about Nick as I wrote 'famous journalists'. Is it ever justifiable to liken AGW sceptics to holocaust deniers? That was the question in front of the great and good of the London literati in January 2010. In March 2014 Nick has said yes much more clearly and given his reasons. Once again, I'm grateful for the clarity, if not for the likely effects if such language becomes fully 'normalised'.