The BBC reports:
“The sceptics now have a feeling of being on the winning side of the debate thanks to the pause,” said Marcel Crok, a Dutch author who accepts the idea that human activities warm the planet, but is sceptical about the scale of the effect.
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Who are the climate sceptics?Although there are only a small number of mainstream scientists who reject the established view on global warming, they are supported by a larger group of well resourced bloggers and citizen scientists who pore through climate literature and data looking for evidence of flaws in the hypothesis.
There are many different shades of opinion in the sceptical orbit. Some such as the group Principia Scientific reject the “myth” of greenhouse gas warming.
There are also political sceptics, such as some members of the Republican party in the US, who argue that climate science is a hoax or a conspiracy.
But there are also sceptical bloggers such as Anthony Watts and Andrew Montford who accept the basic science that adding carbon to the atmosphere can affect the temperature. They contest mainstream findings on the sensitivity of the climate to carbon and the future impacts on temperature.
“You are now starting to see a normalisation of climate science. Suddenly mainstream researchers, who all agree that greenhouse gases play a huge role, start to disagree about the cause of the pause.
“For me this is a relief, it is finally opening up again and this is good.”
The view that the sceptics have positively impacted the IPCC is supported by Prof Arthur Petersen, who is a member of the Dutch government team currently examining the report.
“The sceptics are good for the IPCC and the whole process is really flourishing because of this interaction over the past decades,” he told BBC News.
“Our best climate researchers are typically very close to really solid, sceptical scientists. In this sense scepticism is not necessarily a negative term.”
Same old “flat earth” straw man arguments. Debate is so much easier when you get to tell you opponents what they believe. Republicans don’t have any sound arguments pertaining to wether proposed legislation would even accomplish the goals stated. They’re all just scared that the illuminati is behind the whole thing. Or maybe it’s ancient aliens. No real scientist disagrees with us, it’s just a bunch of “citizen scientists”. So what does that make the “mainstream scientists” if they aren’t citizens?
“Suddenly mainstream researchers, who all agree that greenhouse gases play a huge role, start to disagree about the cause of the pause.”
Suddenly? only if you are a glacier.
Good Translation, you should work for the UN
Translation: “We haven’t got exclusive control of the surface temperature datasets anymore, we can’t deny the lack of warming for going on damn’ near two decades, and since Climategate broke, everybody on the planet knows that we’ve been playing ‘pal review’ to pervert the scientific literature. Each of us has gotta weasel away from this fraud or we can kiss our jobs goodbye!”