<p>Spidey-</p>
<p>I would love to know all the billions to be made in promoting global warming. Given that the fossil fuel industry globally runs close to 1 trillion dollars, where do you think the most money can be made? Even with money being spent on grants to research the affects of CO2 and such, even assuming that runs into a couple of billions, it pales compared to what interests supporting the fossil fuel energy are spending. The comparison is ridiculous, given that the oil, gas and coal industry spend thousands of times what they do on research into containing CO2, alternate fuels, etc on lobbying, pr and yes, ‘paid research’, if I were looking to make a killing, I would be skeptical, too (and I am not saying all skeptics are bought and paid for). The argument that the backers of global warming are doing so because they have financial interest to do so is quite frankly an outright lie, one I have heard told time and again on right wing blogs and news programs and such. </p>
<p>And I agree with Cartera, take a look at the list of skeptics and what they are saying. A number of them, including Freeman Dyson, are saying that we simply don’t know what the effects of man made warming is, that the projections and models may or may not be on target; others are saying that global warming is real, but that at this point anything we could do would be meaningless, and we would be better off preparing for the effects (one of the people on that list said just that as do some others). Some of the people on that list aren’t scientists, two of them are members of right wing think tanks like the Cato institute, whose notion is basically if anything does anything that could possibly cut down maximim profits, it is wrong (and both the clowns on that list you posted from these think tanks also believe that free markets always operate best and business people always behave rationally because of self interest, and if you believe that one, I have a bridge to sell you). There are plenty of skeptics within the community that accepts global warming, and even among those who accept it there is a lot of skepticism that it is going to happen as quickly or as badly as some suggest, and that is normal. </p>
<p>People are right to be skeptical, scientists have been skeptical all along, but guess what, many of them have been won over, and that is the way science works. Crichton is wrong about something, I like his writings, and he is correct that science can get caught up in orthodoxy and such, but he is wrong that consensus is not science. Science is not like the revealed religion that drives many, including a lot of the deniers, it doesn’t claim absolute answers, and in science consensus is how we determine what is accepted theory, because it involves so many voices. Can a group view like that be totally wrong? Potentially, yes, and possibly 1 person could be write and everyone else wrong, but because of the way theory is adaptable, the way science operates, the skeptics have to bring in real evidence of their arguments and they have to use the tools of science to show how what is being proposed is wrong. It cannot be arguments made in the Wall St Journal, and it cannot be done the way the creationists have done it, where they put out half truths and distortions as fact, or point to holes in a theory, as proof the entire theory is wrong, and it doesn’t work like that. Not many years ago, deniers groups pointed out that antarctica didn’t seem to be experiencing the melting that the arctic is, but what that leaves out is current evidence is that it is, and that the relative coolness there can be explained by what is understood about warming. </p>
<p>I also keep hearing about how skeptics are shut out, but what is funny, I hear that yelled from every right wing corner of things, but I cannot find any real evidence presented this is going on. For example, I have not heard of a paper skeptical of global warming, one that contains observational or experimental data, being turned down from a scientific journal that upon review, wasn’t found to be deficient in terms of publication in a peer review journal. Creationists have been screaming that for years, but every time people examine “creationist” pieces they tried to submit, what they find out is sloppy methodology and data that doesn’t match what real data suggests, it is basically a religious pamphlet pretending to be science. Creationists do much of what many skeptics do, they point at holes and gaps in theory, or inconsistencies in some portions, and play the all or none game, when gaps like that are common. </p>
<p>BTW, your categorizing of Climate Science as “junk science” is absolutely ridiculous, that is a slogan used by the types who blindly follow what Fox News and the like tell them. It is branch of science that has its own methods and discipline, that applies fields such as physics and chemistry and geology into understanding how the climate works, which is the basis for the theory that allows meterology to work, and also in how complex systems work. It is nothing more then an old dodge, to come up with a way to discredit something, it is like those who discredit research of the Catholic Church and the holocaust by saying anyone who is critical is anti catholic; rather then talk about facts, they go after the messenger</p>
<p>And your rhetoric quite frankly is a bit tiresome, you make it sound like people who are skeptical of Climate Change are being burned at the stake or arrested or otherwise being hurt, and that is nonsense, it is out there rhetoric that sounds like a Sarah Palin stump speech and not based in any kind of reality. </p>
<p>BTW, there has been real documented censorship, and it isn’t global warming skeptics. Joseph Hansen of NASA was told to stop speaking about global warming by the Bush administration, he was literally told he could lose his position for doing so. And want something to think about? During the Bush administration studies of climate, based in satellites and other observations, were literally blacked out over the artic region, right now there is a dearth of data for the past decade or so…and it was deliberate, both Scientific American and the Journal Science reported on this one. Think that is coincidence, or maybe they are afraid of what they find?</p>
<p>One guys argument in the list of skeptics was typical of what I see. He said something to the effect that in the global geological record, there is no evidence that mankind has ever influenced the global climate the way global warming theorists claim. There is a big problem with this, one that the guy obviously didn’t think about, and that is the geological record won’t do you much good, because mankind has only developed the technology to influence things within the last century, too small a time to see in the geological record. What the geological record does show, however, is that natural phenomenon that cause warming, the natural cycles of warming and cooling and so forth, do not happen in short periods of time, they happen over many centuries, and what we are seeing today is happening much, much more rapidly then natural phenomenon suggest.</p>
<p>When I talk about the idiot set, it isn’t censorship, it is those people who accept something because others tell them to, who don’t question things. There are people who are skeptics of global warming, like Dr. Dyson, whom I respect and would never call an idiot. On the other hand, those who throw around the stuff they are told on Fox news channel, people like Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin who throw out ‘facts’ they couldn’t understand in a million years, is what I am talking about. Yes, there are idiots on the global warming support side of things, there are granola heads who want people to go back to living in yurts and herding sheep, there are activistis who have this vision that living primitively is the way to go, and there are people who run around blowing things out of proportion showing florida under water and such. Both ends drive me nuts, because in the end, both are offering nothing but paralysis. When you threw out that ‘science’ once supported a flat earth, it falls into that range, because ‘science’ never supported that. First of all, it was held at a time when science didn’t exist as such, but more importantly, educate people knew the earth was round, the ancient Greeks had measured the circumfrence of the earth and Columbus knew it was round as well, but i have heard that thrown out by the idiot set as well.</p>
<p>When someone can explain to me how in 30 years we can go from the northwest passage being frozen to being navigable, when the artic has lost an incredible amount of ice packs that had existed for 10’s of thousands of years, when people can explain hundred year meterological events that start happening more and more frequently and show me how natural events could cause that, I would listen. My problem with most of the so called skeptics is they criticize the models, they claim this is all natural, but I haven’t seen anything from the skeptics explaining what we are seeing.</p>
<p>BTW, Michael Crichton also claimed that inhaling second hand cigarette smoke was junk science as well…</p>
Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics</p>