George Monbiot is a writer I hope everyone who reads this site pays attention to (or will, now). His latest piece in the Guardian, The sceptics are skating on thin ice, is a good example of why I think he deserves your attention:

The weather of the past few weeks would have been unexceptional in the early 1980s. Today it is being cited as definitive proof that manmade climate change can’t be happening. There’s a splendid example of such blithering idiocy here: Gerald Warner, writing in the Telegraph, contends that the cold snap lends more support to the idea of a new ice age than to global warming theory. Were he to apply this reasoning consistently, he would have to write another blog on Sunday showing that, due to the unseasonably warm temperatures the Met Office forecasts for the UK this weekend, global warming is definitely happening. And the following week, if there’s another cold snap, he should predict a new ice age again.

Faced with a choice between global temperature records covering more than a century, or three weeks of cooling in one small corner of the planet, Mr Warner chooses the second dataset to identify long-running global trends. Though he has evidently never read or never understood a peer-reviewed paper on this subject in his entire life, he then goes on to dismiss this whole canon of science as nonsense. Is there any other subject on which journalists can make such magnificent idiots of themselves and still keep their jobs?

When heatwaves strike, climate scientists and environmentalists tend towards caution, explaining that though such events may be consistent with predictions they cannot be used as proof that climate change is taking place: only the long-running global trend is a reliable guide. If anyone is foolish enough to present a heatwave as clear evidence of manmade climate change, the deniers jump all over them. The same critics then use every snow flurry or frozen puddle as evidence of the collapse of global warming theory.

The thought that I might never skate outdoors again feels like a bereavement. I pray for another cold snap, even though I know it will bring all the nincompoops in Britain out of their holes, yapping about a new ice age.

My only objection involves the use of “skeptics” in the title, and to be fair, I don’t know if Monbiot wrote that title, or if it’s the handiwork of an editor, as is common practice in the non-blogging world. I’ll come back to this point below.

The issue that Monbiot focuses on–how various factions in the infowar use and abuse facts–is one that I think gets far too little attention. While there are surely willing perpetrators of nonsense in all camps, I also think it’s clear that the deniers commit more than their share of sins. The hardest of the hardcore deniers have a shameful record of latching onto any scrap of raw data and making wild, ridiculous extrapolations from samples that are very limited in geographic range and/or time frame; if various forms of conclusion jumping were on Olympic sport, these people would collect more gold medals every year than Michael Phelps did in Beijing.

If that were the end of the deniers’ sins it would be bad enough, but they also play a much more subtle and subversive word game, which happens to intersect with a minor change in my writing that astute readers may have noticed. The deniers simply love the term “global warming”, as it makes it ever so easy to cook up phony talking points, whether based on geographically and temporally challenged “evidence” of warming or fantasies of how wonderful a warmer world will be, at least for the intended audience. (As always, the deniers love to keep moving the goal posts–the planet isn’t warming, and if it is it’s not warming everywhere, and if it is it’s a good thing, etc., ad nauseum.) As a result of the sheer utility of the term “global warming”, they not only use it, but go ballistic when anyone, like a real scientist, insists on calling it “climate change”. They scream about how the “global warming believers are changing the rules” and go off in yet another manufactured huff that plays all too well with the anti-intellectual crowd.[1]

Which brings me back to my change: I’ve decided to draw a line in the thesaurus and call the changes we’re making in the atmosphere via our greenhouse gas emissions “climate chaos”. My reasoning is simple: “Global warming” isn’t entirely accurate, as it carries the implication of “nothing but universal warming”, and it makes life too easy for the deniers. “Climate change” is more accurate, as it encompasses more than just temperature, but as we learn more about how all those billions of tons of CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere are impacting the entire biosphere, and the evidence continues to pile up that the changes are coming much quicker than we expected, I became convinced we needed a more accurate (and pointed) term. Hence, climate chaos.

Finally, there’s my “skeptics” objection. The problem is that we should all bee skeptics, at least in the sense of demanding proof before dashing to leap on a new conclusion. That form of data-driven skepticism is the foundation of good science, and, one would hope, good policy making. As with “global warming” and “climate change”, a stronger word is needed to more accurately portray the level of (often willful) ignorance and (often well financed) anti-green rhetoric that gets sprayed around the infosphere. That’s why I think “denier” is a much better choice. (And for the record, I certainly didn’t invent that usage; I picked up the term from Joe Romm, and I have no idea where it began.)

[1] As I’ve pointed out before, one of the most enlightening and depressing things one can do is set Google e-mail alerts for “global warming”, “Al Gore”, “James Hansen”, “IPCC”, etc. For your effort you will get a steady stream of stunning nonsense from deniers publishing on blogs and editorial pages.