“I am going to resist the temptation to name names. But everyone working in the field knows who is a warmista, skeptic, or denier.”
Fred Singer writes at American Thinker:
Gallia omnia est divisa in partes tres. This phrase from Julius Gaius Caesar about the division of Gaul nicely illustrates the universe of climate scientists — also divided into three parts. On the one side are the “warmistas,” with fixed views about apocalyptic man-made global warming; at the other extreme are the “deniers.” Somewhere in the middle are climate skeptics…
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.
Of course, these three categories do not have sharp boundaries; there are gradations. For example, many skeptics go along with the general conclusion of the warmistas but simply claim that the human contribution is not as large as indicated by climate models. But at the same time, they join with deniers in opposing drastic efforts to mitigate greenhouse (GH) gas emissions.
I am going to resist the temptation to name names. But everyone working in the field knows who is a warmista, skeptic, or denier…
Singer began what has now turning into a full blown censorship of arguments from the Deniers of the Greenhouse Effect Dogma.
It is not the Deniers who are unwilling to discuss this..
I agre with Singer’s base point about the “deniers”. I’m tired of fighting our own side on the stupidest of issues.
Claiming that the greenhouse gas effect violates thermodynamics – how sophomoric can you be? If that were true, then insulation wouldn’t work because your cold jacket can’t heat up your warm skin.
While the 800 year gap in temperature and CO2 means that the correlation is not proof of CO2-> Temp. It does not mean that C02-> Temp cannot happen.
The whole “it’s only 300 ppm. How could it affect the atmosphere?” nonsense. Of course the warmist counter of “drink a 300 ppm concentration of ricin” is no better, but seriously.
Worth reading as a review of IPCC arguments with confirmation of no new evidence and no more convincing theory in the upcoming AR5. He’s using a narrow definition of skeptic meaning he is classifying anyone concluding that the AGW scientific hypothesis is true or that any competing scientific hypothesis truly disproves the AGW hypothesis is either a warmista or a denier. The only denier-like quibble I have with the piece (no warmista quibble is going to find any internal harmonic to resonate with in my mind) is that he comes off as too focused on IPCC arguments (including models as science) at the exclusion of alternates – or the missing variables deception as another writer has put it. In other ways Fred appears to a warmista as a denier in questioning the over-conceded magnitude of temperature change when even deniers will sometimes make a concession for argument’ sake.
If they had come up with a falsifiable hypothesis on how AGW will result in catastrophe, all this would begin to matter. (How does one prove that things will go on in a particular way / that temperature won’t reverse the next day or century anyway?) In the meantime, my non-professionally concerned citizen sense of the science is that the burden of proof is theirs, that the null hypothesis holds until such time and, contrary to Dr. Fred’s skepticism of “denier” scientists, that such proof will be convincing. After all, a lot of expert skeptic were expert warmers until they stopped to think scientifically.
At the time of CAGW proof, we might even have some technology that would make one bit of difference without causing more harm than the problem and that would not require governing all behavior by a bunch of stopped clocks.
Name-calling doesn’t help.