Judith Curry has rehashed a post (which first appeared in 2010) that solicits readers to describe their backgrounds and perspectives on climate science. It's praised in the comments and touted on twitter as a way to show that deniers are not actually deniers, but rational, credible, science-based skeptics.
So, out of the 237 responses at the time of writing, let's take a look at the first ten to see if the comments represent true scientific "skepticism" or some form of political/ ideological driven "denial." Response one focuses on model methodology, and it's pretty smart sounding, which starts us off with one point for the "skeptic" camp. Number two isn't actually a skeptic at all, but then we have a succession of comments spouting denier arguments. Number three: Climategate. Number four: "Society is under attack…by Western academia." Five: "the global warming scare is highly politicised." Six: "Progressive Green Mafia." That gives us four deniers in a row. Seven doesn't believe in the reliability of models, feedbacks, or land temperatures, but since it's not explicitly political, we'll consider it scientific skepticism. That brings the skeptic count to two and the denier count to four, with one person understanding the realities of climate change.
Number eight is interesting; a PhD physicist seems to waver between scientific and political skepticism, mentioning the UN before any science and indicating that he was, "Turned off by the posturizing, end-of-world claims of Hansen, Mann, Schmidt, etc." Though it leans heavily towards a kind of ideological "just-world hypothesis" driven denial, we'll call this one a wash in deference to his academic credentials. Number nine was written by a clear ideologue, citing past "scares" like global cooling, as was number ten, which says, "Many of the people pushing the danger are radical extremists who seem to hate any human activity and use the threat of AGW to halt the dreaded consumers from consuming." The total for the first ten responses: skeptics-two, deniers-six, with one comment somewhere in between and another expressing agreement with the consensus.
While other comment samples may well provide a different mix, we'll end by pointing out that the ideological indicator "climategate" appears nearly 50 times in the comments. It's referenced more than scientific terms like "IPCC" (mentioned 36 times), Curry's pet issue of "certainty" (12), or talk of "climate sensitivity" (with 18 mentions, 15 of which are from just two comments).
So, when it comes to the claim that "deniers aren't really deniers," we're skeptics.
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