World most high profile climate change sceptic 'changes mind'?
Suitably tabloid thread title for you data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Amazed that this hasn't been posted here. Dividing up 'general chat' was a real error if you ask me...
Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change | Environment | The Guardian Lomborg was never a skeptic. It's just Grauniad spin. Er...yes he was. Na, he has always believed in global warming. As a statistician he just wasn't happy with the fabricated data & doom-monger nonsense put about by the like of the WWF and Greenpeace (of whom he is a member). Perhaps that's enought be called a [-]heretic[/-] skeptic. Whats this "grauniad" about, seen it a few times now. The Guardian "Grauniad" newspaper was famous for its appalling spelling, usually due to mistakes by the typesetters. They even spelt the name of the newspaper itself wrongly once. //static.avforums.com/styles/avf/smilies/facepalm.gif I think it was Private Eye that gave it the nickname originally. As far as I could tell, the highest profile global warming skeptics fit into 2 categories:
The totally unqualified to comment, and the qualified but heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry*.
The same sorts you would have expected to see back when the ciggarette companies were trying to deny the link between smoking and cancer.
Same techniques used, miss information, miss direction, capitalisation and miss representation of simple human errors.
*or related partisan organisation. It's the very fast and loose usage of the word skeptic that makes me smile.
A scientific skeptic:
with the abilities to quantify and validate the empirical data to a point of making a qualified assesment as to whether it meets their stringent requirements for a supported hypothesis.
Has some scientific credibility and respect.
A public skeptic or personality:
A member of the general public or a personality in the public domain that decides to follow a particular school of thought based not on any particular qualified assessment, but on their own personal feelings and understanding of the analysis of others.
Only has respect based on popularity or pure charismatic ability to persuade.
Most of us posters are going to generally fall into the public skeptic category if we wish to challenge what is understood to be the general scientific consenus or in some cases the world view if the consenus of the public is not that of science.
From my perspective, the main high profile sources of scientific skepticism come from scientists that have been shown to have financial links to the fossil fuel industry.
The main high profile public skeptics are usually associated with Fox News and other clown shoes broadcasting networks with their thinly disguised extreme partisanship and their demonstratable lies.
There are other exceptions, like David barmpot Bellamy, but mostly they tend to have links to industry, churches or the media looking to sell airspace and book deals.
From the non skeptic side, the vast majority are highly qualified, highly talented and high profile individuals and organisations, many with total political freedom and no financial motivation.
Royal Society guide to climate change vs' Fox News. nope Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud' ⢠The Register Yep .... the Royal Society, that's the UK's world famous and prestigious science accedemy published a guide to the issues and science behind the issues and the relative levels of consenus and agreements.
I trust their guidance to be free from prejudice, clear, conscise and the best available body to trust.
If you aren't prepared to trust the RS, you might as well pretty much accept that no science is open for you to trust, like those of the skeptics that have far less respect and credibility than those in the RS I can assure you.
Rather than say Fox News and a physicist from the US having a rant about some people milking the potentials for research grants.
People jumping on the bandwagon does not detract from ALL the other scientists that are not envolved in attracting grants for global warming that have reviewed the research and published the Royal Societies guides.