"Non-Scientist" magazine's special report on "denial"

How "denial" is portrayed in Non Scientist

Note that they don’t devote a special report to investigating dodgy scientific practices in climate research, such as deleting emails, fudging data and skewing the peer-review process by intimidating journals. Oh no. That’s all fine and dandy. Instead, their special report sets up a long line of straw men about “denial” and then proceeds to blow them over:

From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march. Why are so many people refusing to accept what the evidence is telling them? Over the next 10 pages we look at the phenomenon in depth. What is denial? What attracts people to it? How does it start, and how does it spread? And finally, how should we respond to it? (source)

And we don’t even have to look very far to see that this will be the usual tedious rant against climate realists:

A climate denier has a position staked out in advance, and sorts through the data employing “confirmation bias” – the tendency to look for and find confirmatory evidence for pre-existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss the rest. (source)

As if the consensus scientists are completely impartial and free-thinking, when their next funding cheque depends on alarmist research that grabs media attention? Or what about the fact that the IPCC’s sole purpose is to find evidence for a pre-conceived conclusion, that of man-made warming, and they will therefore ignore huge chunks of research because they are inconvenient? That sentence above describes the IPCC precisely. And, inevitably, the comparisons with tobacco follow:

In 1972, Tobacco Institute vice-president Fred Panzer outlined his industry’s “brilliantly executed” defence strategy. A key tactic was “creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it” while “encouraging objective scientific research.”

“Objective scientific research”: those words would almost make you believe that Panzer was talking about objective science. But when doubt is your goal, the misuse of language is just another way to confuse the public.

Where tobacco led the way, coal and chemicals followed. And, of course, the fossil fuel industry has been working overtime – and with shocking success – creating doubt about climate change. (source)

The fact that governments and environmental groups have thrown billions of dollars at shonky science to “prove” man-made warming appears to have escaped the author of that little rant, who happens to be Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog, the warmists’ nirvana. Need I say more?

There is one article (out of six) that correctly claims that denial is a cheap slur:

The concept of denialism is itself inflexible, ideological and intrinsically anti-scientific. It is used to close down legitimate debate by insinuating moral deficiency in those expressing dissident views, or by drawing a parallel between popular pseudoscience movements and the racist extremists who dispute the Nazi genocide of Jews. (source)

But to be honest it’s lost in the noise… (h/t WUWT)