Climate Skeptics v. Climate Deniers

Excellent discussion of the difference between a global warming skeptic and a denier. I don’t think the author misses anything.

Alas, a much larger number use the term “skeptic” as a re-labeling trick, while wallowing in the standard narratives of distraction and delay, exhibiting patterns described in Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Only now, as more recently related in Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science and in Denialism, by Michael Specter, the trend toward dismissal of science has gone into overdrive, propelled by forces that are intensely political.

So here is the problem: What discrete characteristics distinguish a rational, pro-science “climate skeptic” who has honest questions about the AGW consensus from members of a Denialist Movement that portrays all members of a scientific community as either fools or conspirators?

And if you want to know a few of the shadowy ones behind the deniers, there’s a story in the New Yorker: Covert Operations