I doubt the accuracy of climate change predictions but I think you have to be denying a lot of reality if you believe the climate doesn’t change. I don’t know that there’s a good way to measure how much human activity is affecting the climate but you have to be out of your gourd if you don’t believe terraforming the planet, changing the entire distribution of plant and animal species, and spewing tons of pollution into the air and the water is not affecting the climate.
So what defines a climate change denier? Do you have to believe the climate doesn’t change? If you believe the change are cyclical and the current trends will just reverse soon are you a denier? If you believe human activity is not the major factor in measureable climate change are you a denier? If you are just a general skeptic and believe any predictions are wrong are you a denier?
If you believe the current climate trend isn’t a warming one and/or that the cause isn’t human activity, and you claim to have looked at the available evidence at least on a surface level, you’re a climate change denier.
If you haven’t even had a look at the evidence you’re just willfully ignorant.
This. Because I’ve never heard anyone claim that climate cannot change. The debate is between those who think we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissiont to lessen our impact on the climate, vs. those who think we can emit as much CO2 as we want without any ill effect.
What about someone who believes that the climate is changing and that human activity (specifically CO2 emissions) is a major factor, but that the predicted consequences won’t be as bad as some people fear, and/or that attempting to massively reduce our CO2 emissions to the extent needed to turn the tide would do more harm than good?
If you believe any of those things, the evidence is against you. If you have expertise in the field, the onus is on you to present your findings and convince the rest of the scientific community. If not, you’re almost certainly unjustified in taking that position. Whether that makes you a “climate change denier” or not is, I suppose debatable. That’s why I prefer more general terms such as “crackpot”. People who, without compelling evidence, reject one scientific consensus, invariably reject many others. I see no great practical need to categorise them too finely.
I would say that the skeptical position is that if an overwhelming majority of the experts support a hypothesis, it is not necessarily true, but it is probably unwise to positively assert that it is false.
Hard to say. I can see why someone without preconceived bias might come to this conclusion. On the other hand, some deniers profess to having this viewpoint, but it turns out to be just a strawman attack on climate change - by focusing on the more extreme predictions and arguing against those, and by extension, insinuating that all predictions of negative consequences should be dismissed. E.g. “they said the Arctic will be free of ice by now, but it isn’t, so you shouldn’t trust them when they say <any prediction>.”
Nobody in their right mind denies that climate change occurs. The issue is when someone doesn’t fall into lockstep with the liberal assertions that we humans are causing it. Then the namecalling starts.
Climate change warns us that significant attitude adjustments and palpable life changes are necessary to ward off climate change and avert a social apocalypse. Deniers hold that even if there is measurable change, it is not that bad and we can continue with our current world-view paradigms, and if anything starts to go bad, we can fix it later.
I have. I’ve met people who when I explained that we can even know what the climate was like before there were written records (from analyzing tree rings, among other things) responded “well, that’s just daft!”
Some people think Ice Age is just a bunch of animated movies.