from A Change fo Climate by Mark Steyn:

“Climate Change Not A Top Worry In US,” reports Gallup, deadpan. Washington’s Potemkin parliament can hold as manypajama parties as it wants, but Big Climate absolutism is going nowhere, and the savvier scientists – the ones who haven’t been seduced by political patrons and celebrity pals – are beginning to understand they need to figure out a different tack. Dr Judith Curry’s recent post on “positioning skeptics” (drawing on a longer essay by Ben Pile) includes the following observation by Professor Jonathan Jones of Oxford University:

It has been amusing to watch the apparent surprise of many climate scientists at their discovery that many “climate sceptics” are actually lukewarmers. Taking a rough and ready definition, that lukewarmers believe in AGW but doubt catastrophic AGW, one could reasonably place many of the more famous sceptics (Liljegren, McIntyre implicitly, Montford, Watts explicitly) in that camp, together with a number of “maverick” climate scientists (Curry, Lewis, Lindzen).

Mustafa Prize winner Michael E Mann doesn’t want you to think like this. In Mann’s world, there are two teams – Scientists vs Deniers – and if you don’t root root root for the home team you must be with the other fellows’. Thus, Dr Curry was a scientist until she found herself in partial disagreement with Mann, at which point he moved her on to the “#AntiScience” team. Michael Liebreich is on the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Group on Sustainable Energy and the Clinton Global Initiative’s Climate Change working group, but he linked to a piece by James Delingpole, so Dr Mann moved him into the “fan of uber-deniers” category, and for good measure added “#Damning #Unconstructive” (Dr Mann holds the Nobel Prize in Hashtags).

HKO

Science progresses by embracing skepticism, not crushing it.

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