Gosh—I’m a denier!

At least, that’s what I’m told incessantly by internet trolls and other assorted characters who still continue to push the CAGW barrow. They have spoken the truth, you see, and I have denied it.

In using the term denier, the obvious and rather silly allusion is to those who deny the Holocaust, or Shoah, took place in 20^th-century Europe. A more damning comparison—were there a scintilla of substance to it—is difficult to imagine. And is there? Let me see now: well, I don’t see or read of hundreds of eminent historians in universities the world over refuting the vast body of documentary, physical and other evidence of that event. Nor do I see every week in the newspapers, revelations that Auschwitz, Bełżec and Treblinka were in fact movie sets, hastily erected by Jewish operatives at the end of the Second World War and designed to prick the consciences of Gentiles into handing them a homeland in the Middle East. Or read of elderly Jews caught in lies and deceptions after giving oral testimony of their experiences. And yet, those peddling Global Warming as the problem—and totalitarianism as the solution—would place us in the same bucket as David Irving and his ilk. I won’t dignify the comparison by dwelling on it further.

When shown the idiocy of this comparison, the Warmist next attempts to compare me to those who deny that man landed on the moon in 1969, or deny that the earth is billions of years old, or even (gasp) deny the U.S. government was telling the whole truth about the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001. I’d certainly admit to being a denier of phlogiston, a geocentric universe, and an absolute scale of time—each of which was entertained by at least 90% of the scientific community at the time, until faced with, um, experimental evidence to the contrary.

The opposite of a denier, of course is a believer. One who takes his precepts on faith, unsupported by real-world evidence, or worse, in the face of real-world evidence. There’s nothing innately wrong with belief per se. I, for example, hold a belief in the existence of an infinite being, though I can’t prove it to you on a blackboard. What’s more, my belief is serenely unshaken by physicists demonstrating they can deduce the necessary existence of the universe without recourse to an infinite being. Good for them. But I think (in fact, I know) we’re using two very different definitions of existence.

The problem with belief starts at the exact moment when it ceases to be a personal, private affair, and one’s belief starts becoming projected onto others; innocuously at first, but then with increasing compulsion, physical force and ultimately…

Nevertheless, if you can find it within yourself to do so, spare a thought for the committed CAGW believer. Political convictions, a determination to never reach the day when they are forced to admit they were wrong all along, and possibly a certain bloody mindedness, compel them to maintain their belief. They continue to do so, despite the pillars of evidence crumbling about them, despite prediction after prediction of computer models being falsified by actual observations. They continue to do so in the face of outright public refutations by literally hundreds of scientists, many of them full professors in Departments of Atmospheric Science, Climatology, Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Statistics and other related disciplines (my colleague RealityReturns over at the UK Telegraph blog does a sterling job in reminding believers and newcomers alike of this “inconvenient truth”). They continue to do so, despite the mounting wave of governments and citizens the world over, having heard the believers’ message, deciding it’s a dud. They’re all deniers too, you see—every last one of them.

In the case of CAGW, it appears the believers’ trouble is that, with each passing year—sometimes, it seems, with each passing week—there’s less and less to deny.