"Climate Change Denier" is a term coined by radical environmentalists in an attempt to paint their opponents as crazy and stupid. Most rational people don't deny that climate change is occurring. Many people simply side with scientists that have examined the facts and determined that human attempts at trying to control climate change are about as effective as Indian rain dances.
That said, Tim Cook's response was correct. The measure this group proposed was actually very broad. They wanted the company to base all decisions on ROI only. Had it been adopted by the board, it would have instantly opened the company up to a flood of shareholder lawsuits over any number of expenditures that don't directly generate profits.
> this group [does not deny] that climate change is occurring
But their press release says
> Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change.
which sounds like denial to me. Would you prefer to call them "Climate Change Skeptics," the term coined by radical conservatives to attempt to paint themselves as not crazy and anti-scientific?
Everyone plays the "name yourself according to something non-controversial, name your opponent according to something controversial" game. I wouldn't get too upset about it.
"Climate change" used to be "global warming" until that term became so strongly associated with extremists that it instantly damaged the credibility of anyone that used it. "Climate Change Skeptics" communicates the same thing as "deniers". You are missing the point. Most people agree that climate change (aka global warming) is occurring. The argument is over whether we can cause it or stop it.
- Get a Clue, White House: The Planet Isn't Warming
- Do 97% of All Climate Scientists Really Believe Mankind is Causing Catastrophic Global Warming?
- Planet Hasn't Warmed Since 1997, Yet Senators Fret the News Media is Covering Actual Crises Instead of Climate Change
Based on those, I'd say NCPPR is denying that it's happening.
Global warming dropped from use because it is inaccurate (or more precicly is too broad to be useful). While the global temperature is increasing, there are places that see a decrease. Usually this is due to either changing rainfall patterns (ie, former deserts that now get rain) or changes in ocean currents (eg the potential movement in the current that keeps the UK warm). Climate change is more accurate for people in those areas.
Semantics aside, you seem to have missed the point. This group seems to doubt it is happening at all ("so called" in this case doesn't mean they disagree with the terminology - instead they seem to doubt it is occurring)
The point is that it's broad in a specific way that makes it easy to misinterpret. Global average temperature increase may not yield local average temperature increase, and the reasons can be complex. Having to first explain that to people that are seeing the opposite of what global warming seems to be saying is a road-block to useful discourse.
It's no longer called global warming because it's too easy for deniers to say, "Look, it's cold! Polar vortex! Therefore it's not happening!" The new terminology is supported by climate scientists to avoid giving the deniers a strawman to argue.
I would guess that they are saying so called because most people who say 'climate change' assume that human-created c02 is the major driver of climate, when all of the detailed measurements taken since the forming of the IPCC have shown that the sensitivity is far lower.
Each IPCC report has increased the confidence of the impact of human emissions, but lowered the effect. So the science says that we are more certain now than before, but that the sensitivity is much lower than understood before. This is great news but most people haven't realized that the scare stories of 10-15 years ago no longer apply. The term 'climate change' is pretty debased though, because it can mean anything from 'natural climate change' to 'Himalayan glaciers are going to melt in 20 years'.
But the wording from this group is silly, there is no doubt.
Both terms have been in use for a long time. When Frank Luntz was a republican strategist he suggested the party use "climate change" exclusively because he believed it sounded less threatening.
Both parties do not to seem to present any kind of evidence to their claim. At least to me Apple's impact on environment does not some anything significant that there is need to waste a lot of money optimizing it.
> No one, including this group, denies that climate change is occurring.
I'm sorry, what planet are you living on? This is regularly argued an national cable news all the time. You can't be taken the least bit seriously when you put such an obvious falsehood as the first argument supporting your ridiculous claim.
"No one, including this group, denies that climate change is occurring"
This is absolutely false. There are denialists that deny the earth is warming, there are more that deny humans have anything to do with it and then more that deny that carbon emissions are worth it and then more still that deny it's a bad thing. Many of them contend all of these points in a throw everything at the wall strategy.
Any scientist worth the oxygen they breathe all seem to be in agreement of 3 things. a) Climate change is real and happening. b) It's most definitely the impact of our utilisation of natural resources. c) That we can take measures to minimise it's effects.
All true, but I think there is a misconception that if we all just recycle more and drive hybrids that climate change will stop. We are accelerating climate change, but even if we stopped all carbon now Bangladesh will still be under water in 150 years or less.
No serious environmentalist I've read believes that misconception. In my view, that's another form of denial. Not the organized PR-flack fraud in the style originated by the tobacco industry, but just the normal human kind of wanting to ignore anything personally inconvenient.
I absolutely do not want to put off anyone from environmental work or a global call to change and stop of pollution and other unsustainable activities. But the fact remains that enough damage has been done that the consequences will be felt for a century, even if we turn around this ship tomorrow.
Sure. Today we're dealing with the environmental consequences of decisions made a century ago. E.g., water policy, urban planning, transport policy, effects of industry. Nature of the beast, really.
Sorry, climate change deniers are stupid and crazy and/or evil. I prefer to call them climate delusionals. Right now we have a choice to either try to ameliorate climate change, or ignore it and watch civilisation collapse over the next century or so. It's a hard problem scientifically and politically, and the delusionals and their loby groups should receive nothing but contempt and derision.
I recently ran into a NOAA [1] scientist and talked to him briefly on the subject. He claimed that was there was effectively no one in the field that had any doubt about anthropogenic climate change, although there were many disputes about details. The few who do argue against it (he knew them by name) are very respected and intelligent, but have contrarian personalities, and tend to dispute specific models and argue in favor of uncertainty, rather than arguing that human behavior is definitively unrelated.
Scientific communities are far from immune to taboos and group-think, and I think every idea deserves scrutiny and (true) skepticism, no matter how "settled". But while the science continues to iterate and refine, policy decisions should be based on weight of evidence, which is vastly in favor of human-caused climate change.
The simple fact of the matter is that something would have to be badly wrong with the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of chemical bonds in order for our understanding of human climate change to be sufficiently defective that the delusionals point of view was somehow more correct than the consensus view.
Our understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of chemical bonds are basically what enable civilisation as we know it.
> "Here's the bottom line: Apple is as obsessed with the theory of so-called climate change as its board member Al Gore is,"
> After today's meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change.
... etc
Every single mention of climate change is prefixed with "so-called", in this PR and every other one. If you read through these articles you'll find that they believe climate change stopped in 1997.
It has always struck me as rather ridiculous to make a big deal about the distinction between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic climate change. Whether or not climate change is anthropogenic, it is going to require a response. The argument might be that efforts should be directed at mitigating the negative effects of climate change, because it is futile to try and avert it, but climate change deniers aren't making that argument either. Indeed, if they really did concede that climate change is happening, but believed that it wasn't anthropogenic, then they should be even more worked up about it than the "radical environmentalists," because that would mean that Illinois is going to have the climate of Texas and there is nothing we can do about it other than figure out how to live with the resulting fallout.
But the cause is important, because that dictates the response. If people continue to think that failed policy ideas like the Kyoto protocol are the effective response, then all we are doing is wasting resources and doing untold damage for no reason. Kyoto and its ilk are the equivalent of throwing virgins at volcanoes.
Adaptation should be about increasing water storage, storm defense and concentrating on uninterrupted energy supply. Research money should be spent on new energy technology and better climate forecasting.
Right now we have billions being spent on innefectual or worse solutions, because the responses are based on 20 year-old understanding of climate sensitivity, which has proven to be incorrect by several orders of magnitude.
If Illinois does turn into Texas, what you absolutely dont want is having sent the previous fifty years wasting your productive capacity on worthless solutions.
Among my conservative friends, quite a few say "well, it's happening, but we don't know humans are causing it." So they are already there. "Adaptation, not mitigation" is one of their sayings, and it gets the environmentalists really mad.
FWIW, I agree with you that the cause matters less than the effects.
I know its widespread, but I find it irksome that climate change denial has become associated with conservatism. I want to avoid climate change because I'm worried about the ramifications of that change on our society and am worried that failure to mitigate or prepare for climate change could topple the U.S. from its position at the top of the global hierarchy. Changing climate and depletion of water resources in the heartland could make us tremendously vulnerable by making us dependent on other countries for food. Allowing a country like China or India to be the first to develop reliable, cheap, renewable energy would be a total game changer that could leave us as an also-ran country or vassal state. There's a mile long list of conservative reasons to be afraid of and want to address climate change and its potential impacts. To me its a no brainer to spend substantial, but predictable, resources to address what is potentially an existential risk.
The US overproduces food right now. Climate change could change that, but offsetting any production reduction in the heartland would be that northern states become more amenable to more crops. And Canada, too: they aren't going to be a dicks about trucking food over the border.
> Allowing a country like China or India to be the first to develop reliable, cheap, renewable energy would be a total game changer that could leave us as an also-ran country or vassal state.
I don't see how this happens, unless a bunch of other things also happen to go wrong at the same time. China would have to start respecting other countries' IP rights for real, and patents would only keep things locked up for so long. And it's not like China or India would have a monopoly on understanding and improving whatever that new technology is.
Anything serious enough to raise the specter of "vassal state" and the US would just ignore IP rights pretty much the same way China ignores foreigners' IP rights out of self-interest.
I still see climate change as possibly causing billions or trillions dollars of economic harm, so it's worth addressing.
We already have a highly efficient food production industry in the U.S.? It's market-driven too. Yes the Oglala is running out of water, but we knew that was a one shot deal. There may be a rough patch but if climate change is man made, I think I will self correct when we start to run low on fossil fuels.
No, NCPPR categorically are crazy and stupid. No need to coin terms to paint them as such when their own words do a perfectly good job of it on their own.
>They simply side with scientists that have examined the facts and determined that human attempts at trying to control climate change are about as effective as Indian rain dances.
To say this is to deny the established causes behind climate change - excess carbon emissions. I doubt the relationship is linear, but the solution is to emit less carbon emissions. This should no longer be controversial.
Interesting..."There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years," he told a US Senate Committee "If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists."
You find crazy on both sides of any major issue. NCPPR and Greenpeace are both nut-job organisations which are best ignored. Not because nothing they say is true, but rather the fact they said something has little to do with how true it is.
Think of it like a horoscope sound and bluster, signifying nothing.
I agree! A focus on sustainability is a good one, carbon sequestration sounds like a great way to spend untold amounts of money.
That said, I'm pretty sure climate change is happening - but I'm not really certain its anthropogenic, and even if it is, I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle anyhow.
I think focusing on carbon seemingly alone is a distraction, Using less resources to do a thing is a good thing anyhow, its cheaper in the long run, carbon alone doesn't get us there.
You're getting a lot of disagreement with parts of your first paragraph, but I think it's worth dwelling for a moment on the good point you make your second paragraph. There are two claims the NCPPR are disputing:
1. Climate change is a big problem, if not for the present then at least for the near future, unless we do something about it.
2. Given that, we should all make an effort to do what we reasonably can about it, instead of caring about nothing whatsoever except money.
If the NCPPR disagree with the first claim, then they should present their best case for that disagreement. I think they're mistaken, but if they have evidence for their position, then let's hear it.
But instead of making that case, they mixed it in with disagreement with the second claim, which is a bad way to argue (mixing empirical questions and value judgments) and makes them come across like sociopaths to boot.
you should try living in the south, where TC is from. There are a lot of climate change deniers. I mean, 60% of the state believes the world is less than 10,000 years old
Most environmentalists aim to reduce known human impacts on climate change. This is actually closer to reducing human control on climate change than doing nothing.
"Climate change denier" refers solely to those who deny the scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming. It's not used to describe those who accept the science but doubt the efficacy or wisdom of the proposed solutions.
I'm actually with you on doubting the ability of public policy to deal with it. We aren't going to stop it, and we will suffer from it. Our only option is to figure out how to adapt to it.
That said, Tim Cook's response was correct. The measure this group proposed was actually very broad. They wanted the company to base all decisions on ROI only. Had it been adopted by the board, it would have instantly opened the company up to a flood of shareholder lawsuits over any number of expenditures that don't directly generate profits.