Quote:

Climate 'denial' is now a mental disorder Christopher Booker is bemused by the wild rhetoric of the climate change lobby. How odd that, last Monday, none of our media global warming groupies should have bothered to report what was billed to be "the largest ever demonstration for civil disobedience over climate change". There was talk of hundreds of thousands of protestors converging on Washington to hear Jim Hansen, the scientist who talks of coal-fired power stations as "factories of death", call yet again for all coal plants to be closed. Perhaps the lack of coverage was due to the fact that, before Hansen arrived to address a forlorn group of several hundred hippies, Washington was blanketed in nearly a foot of snow. It was generally another bad week for the warmists. The Met Office, which has been one of the chief pushers of the global warming scare for 20 years, had to admit that this has been "Britain's coldest winter for 13 years", despite its prediction last September that the winter would be "milder than average". This didn't of course stop it predicting that 2009 will be one of "the top-five warmest years on record". US climate sceptics such as those on the Watts Up With That website, for whom the predictions of the UK Met Office have become a regular source of amusement, recalled its forecast that 2007 would be "the warmest year on record globally", just before global temperatures dived by nearly a full degree Celsius, cancelling out the entire net warming of the past 100 years. Ever wilder wax the beleaguered warmists in their rhetoric. Our science minister Lord Drayson said last week he was "shocked" to find how many of the captains of industry he meets are "climate deniers". This was the same Lord Drayson who, as our defence procurement minister, assured Parliament in 2006 that Snatch Land Rovers afforded "the level of protection we need". The continuing death toll of soldiers in these unprotected vehicles approaches 40. Even Drayson is outbid, however, by the groupies in The Guardian, who now suggest that people like Christopher Booker should no longer be compared to "Holocaust deniers" but consigned to even more outer darkness by branding them as climate "Creationists", the dirtiest word they know. Meanwhile at the University of the West of England in Bristol this weekend, a conference of "eco-psychologists", led by a professor, are solemnly exploring the notion that "climate change denial" should be classified as a form of "mental disorder". I myself am off this weekend to New York, to join all the top "deniers", "creationists" and victims of psychic disorder at a conference organised by the Heartland Institute. It is an honour to be asked to speak alongside such luminaries as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, Dr Fred Singer, founder of the US satellite weather forecasting service, and the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus (not to mention those two revered climate bloggers, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts). I shall report on this historic event next week.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4953981/Climate-denial-is-know-a-mental-disorder.html

While I have long called climate change skeptics, "Denialists", I agree that the connotation of there being the same sort of thinking as displayed by holocaust deniers, is an unfortunate link, which we should not promote.

I therefore suggest we could call those who ignore the overriding bulk of scientific opinion, as insignificant, as;
"Canutists".

This will more appropriately convey there naive attempts to hold back the tide of climate change, in both it's literal, and figurative, senses.

Here is a little from wikipedia about old Canute, for those unfamiliar with his particular idiocy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canute_the_Great

Canute tried to stop the tide...  much like climate-scaremongers think they can turn back the climate.

So no I think the deniers are further from that analogy that climate change-believers

Yes Grendel, I can see how it could be applied to the more shrill climate change activists, who think that if we all start to eat organic vegetables, and live in tepees, then we all will revert back to blissful harmony with nature.

Like the denial side, we do not have a clear, A, or B, option, we have a range of views, and a range of responses, from those who believe it is real, and believe we need to at the very least, attempt to mitigate the worst scenarios, as much as is practicable, to those who will always call for extreme measures, because they are extremists..

I think that one thing that most people do agree on, is that arguing over whether it is real or not, benefits nobody.
Even sceptics should agree with adopting a cautionary approach, because the stakes are too high to do otherwise.