- Rebel Yid - https://www.rebelyid.com -

Deniers vs Skeptics

Few of us who comment on the climate debate know the science involved, but there is more to it than just the science. Claiming to be “beyond left and right” I lean towards a lot of economic thought, but one certainly would expect science to be beyond the constraints of left and right thinking. Scientists are almost by definition skeptics.

My skepticism is based on the language of the radical proponents who treat skeptics like religious heretics. They immediately claim that skeptics are all in the pockets of the carbon fuel industries, when in fact the carbon fuel interests often support the climate change crowd.  When large established industries support such causes and the regulations they spawn, they too often use them to suppress competitions or otherwise seek a market advantage.  Nor should we ignore the influence that government funds have on scientists who are paid to reach preordained conclusions.

History has plenty of dire predictions from the well credentialed that did not come true.   And while we laymen are told to listent to the experts, this usually means listening to just the experts one side wants us to hear.  Furthermore, the ‘experts’ are most often wrong in a field where the variables are infinite and the environment is unstable.  This may be more true of climatology than most other hard scientific fields.

I count myself among the skeptics.  I just do not know enough about the science to state with any certainty that man caused climate change is either true or not, or what the causes and effects of changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are.

S. Fred Singer writes in The American Thinker, Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name [1], 2/129/12.

Excerpts:

In my view, warmistas and deniers are very similar in some respects — at least their extremists are.  They have fixed ideas about climate, its change, and its cause.  They both ignore “inconvenient truths” and select data and facts that support their preconceived views.  Many of them are also quite intolerant and unwilling to discuss or debate these views — and quite willing to think the worst of their opponents.

I have concluded that we can accomplish very little with convinced warmistas and probably even less with true deniers.  So we just make our measurements, perfect our theories, publish our work, and hope that in time the truth will out.

  • “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
  • “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
  • “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
  • “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
  • “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
print