But no major skeptic point (and we’re hard-pressed to think of any minor ones) has ever had to be walked back.
Deutsche Welle reports:
Hartmut Graßl, a climate researcher and the former director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, says there is a political component to climate skepticism.
“Some of them even get paid, by big oil companies for example, to undermine climate change,“ he says. Graßl believes small groups, financed by big interests, are often sent to climate conferences to listen to the arguments at hand and find ways to dispute them.
Questionable theories
Scientists accuse climate skeptics of simply cherry picking the theories that suit them best, rather than accepting the entire truth.
“They dig around for results that fit their argument and then combine them to create a plausible story so that the ordinary person thinks that climate research is misleading,” Carel Mohn says. His organization’s website aims to use climate education and awareness to knock the the wind out of climate skeptics’ sails.
Hartmut Graßl says climate skepticism is primarily “charlatanism.” He stressed that most skeptics are laypersons and hard to find in serious scientific circles and communities.
Religion is interesting. Where did it come from?
Every living organism, including man, has a drive that comes from dynamics to continue his genes in future populations. For humans, maximizing genetic transmission is done with mating with one’s parent or sibling. But such matings lead to inbreeding problems. If a moderately large group agree to mate only among themselves with an insect taboo, then relatedness can be maximized.
There is then the problem of testing who is in the group and eligible for copulation and who is out of the group. Using “What is the square root of 16?” would not work because that can be figured out. Something like “What are the three forms of God?” would work; also eccentric manners as in “My Fair Lady” and sports trivia.
My point is that our species was selected to take up irrational beliefs, such as big oil funds climate skeptics as propagandists. Just the opposite is true as PB had a green logo to show its contribution to sustainable energy.
One side effect of religion is that treatments of others can be severe at times as is playing out in Iraq with the car bombs and with green jihad.
In the song of the Beetles, Hartmut Graßl, is a believer. Actually Isaac Newton held some goofy beliefs too.
Skeptics are not easy to find because if you come out of the climate closet and are not LIndzen or Spencer or Christy you can forget your tenure and grants and research resources!
“They dig around for results that fit their argument and then combine them to create a plausible story…”
Sounds like a climate scientist trying to defend his tranche of money from governments.
Think super storm sandy for one example
Skeptics “listen to the arguments at hand and find ways to dispute them.” Hm. Okay.