In December 2014, our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry issued a now-famous statement calling on news media to stop conflating the terms denier and skeptic. It said skeptics is an honored term that should be reserved for those who are guided by scientific evidence; those who regularly deny good science about climate change should not be allowed to misappropriate a term that scientific skeptics have long used in critiquing pseudoscience and encouraging good science.
The statement, “Deniers Are Not Skeptics” (online at csicop.org and published in the March/April 2015 Skeptical Inquirer, p. 8), was initially signed by forty-eight fellows of the Committee (now fifty-eight, see box), and it generated worldwide discussion and comment.