I started my year at Medill by covering a climate change conference so it seemed appropriate to spend some of my last quarter covering another one. But my experience at the 6th International Conference on Climate Change here in Washington could not have been more different than the Comer Conference in western Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin invitation-only conference featured two days of climate scientists presenting new findings and more confusing charts than I care to remember, all from their scientific specialties – ice core sampling, paleo-oceanography, carbon-dating and other things I never attempted in my high school chemistry class.
The Washington conference was run by people who either do not agree that climate change is manmade or, at a more basic level, that it is occurring.
Their panels included a variety of experts. Some spoke on how adapting to climate change and funneling more money into research for green technology would hurt the economy and stifle job creation. Others criticized the climate change science accepted by the majority of climate scientists.
Wisconsin attendees didn’t talk politics. Washington attendees booed President Barack Obama and applauded pro-Republican jokes. Wisconsin had a bonfire. Washington had an Al Gore mask that I expected someone to light on fire.
Many topics that were originally rooted in science have transformed to a political debate – climate change foremost among them. Covering the science requires one set of skills. But covering a climate conference of skeptics called for a different mind frame and, strangely enough, a different set of vocabulary terms to refer to people involved in the debate.
Most will have heard of the skeptics and deniers as well as the global warming believers, but the Washington conference featured some new labels:
Warmists – This is apparently the new term used for those who think the world is experiencing climate change, that humans are an important cause and that everyone has a responsibility to do something about it.
Lukewarmers – No, it’s not a Star Wars-themed Snuggie. Lukewarmers are those individuals who think that climate change is happening, but is either the result of natural fluctuations in the earth’s temperature or only slightly impacted by human activity. Lukewarmers see little point in taking action to mitigate human impacts on the climate because they are not influential on a global scale. A typical lukewarmer will also reject the more extreme scenarios of future temperature increases, sea level rise or widespread ecological impacts that some scientists predict.
Hotheads – This derogatory term was used for people who think that humans are responsible for raising the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that these numbers will continue to rise and that their increase bodes something terrible for all humanity. Hotheads believe in curbing carbon emissions immediately, lest all of Antarctica and Greenland melt and catastrophic flooding kill millions.
Whether the labels shed light or just cause chuckles, they are now part of the lingo in the climate change debate.