Oxford University Press on Climate Conspiracy Theories
In this article I signalled a new article at The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate on Climate Change Conspiracy Theories by Joseph E. Uscinski, Karen Douglas, and Stephan Lewandowsky. (thanks to Paul Matthews.)
The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate has 170 articles which you can browse here of which 10 deal with the dynamics of climate systems and just 14 deal with, er, climate change including one on Celebrities and Climate Change and another on “Countering Climate Science Denial and Communicating Scientific Consensus” by John Cook.
On the other hand, 113 out of 170 articles deal with Climate Change Communication, which tells you all you need to know about climate change, and The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate, and, incidentally, something rather disturbing about the Oxford University Press.
For four centuries the OUP and the Cambridge University Press had the monopoly of publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible, in defiance of modern laws of copyright. This goldmine enabled them to publish thousands of unprofitable volumes which advanced the frontiers of human understanding (or sometimes not. But that’s science for you.) Now they’re just two more publishing houses, one of which has a website which, unfortunately, is manned by idiots who think that an article about Celebrities and Climate Change is an article about climate change, and that John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky are honest, intelligent experts on something or other.
[It’s come to something – hasn’t it? – when a brand new website like ours, manned by a ragged band of amateurs, can announce without fear of contradiction that a website run by one of the world’s most prestigious publishing houses linked to one of the world’s oldest universities is a load of shite. But that’s the Brave New Internet World for you.]
I intend to write to OUP asking them to retact the article. I wrote to Professor Uscinski on October 4th 2017, and again on October 16th pointing out the errors in his book and in the OUP article, and offering to hold off on a complaint to the OUP until I hear from him. I haven’t yet received a reply.
So what does the OUP article say?
The first sentence of the first paragraph is as follows:
An overwhelming percentage of climate scientists agree that human activity is causing the global climate to change in ways that will have deleterious consequences both for the environment and for humankind.
This is false. There is no research, by Cook or anyone else, which quantifies the number of climate scientists who agree that “human activity is causing the global climate to change in ways that will have deleterious consequences both for the environment and for humankind.” None.
The first paragraph continues:
While scientists have alerted both the public and policy makers to the dangers of continuing or increasing the current rate of carbon emission, policy proposals intended to curb carbon emission and thereby mitigate climate change have been resisted by a notable segment of the public. Some of this resistance comes from … the carbon-based energy industry. Others oppose policies intended to address climate change for ideological reasons… But perhaps the most alarming and visible are those who oppose solutions to climate change because they believe, or at least claim to believe, that anthropogenic climate change is not really happening and that climate scientists are lying and their data is fake.
Three groups of “skeptics” or “denialists” are identified. None of us here at Climate Scepticism fall into any one of the three groups, as far as I know. (Hands up anyone being paid by the carbon-based energy industry, or who has ideological reasons for opposing policies intended to address climate change, or who believes that anthropogenic climate change is not really happening. Anyone? No? So the whole article is revealed as belonging to Never Never Land.)
Second paragraph:
Resistance, in this latter case, sometimes referred to as climate “skepticism” or “denialism,” varies from region to region in strength but worldwide has been a prominent part of a political force strong enough to preclude both domestic and global policy makers from making binding efforts to avert the further effects of anthropogenic climate change.
Oohooh, a conspiracy theory! But a failed conspiracy, since everyone and his Earth Mother believes that the Paris Agreement is a “binding effort to avert the further effects of anthropogenic climate change.” It’s not of course, but that’s what we’re told.
Paragraph three:
Climate skeptics suggest the well-publicized consensus is either manufactured or illusory and that some nefarious force—be it the United Nations, liberals, communists, or authoritarians—want to use climate change as a cover for exerting massive new controls over the populace.
Certainly the well-publicized consensus is illusory, manufactured by John Cook among others, on the suggestion of Stephan Lewandowsky, who in 2010 pointed out to his future doctorate student that believing that everyone else believes something is the royal road to making them believe that thing. But the credit is not Lewandowsky’s. The ultimate source is (Orwell,1948.)
As for the nefarious force of “..communists..“ who “..want to use climate change as a cover for exerting massive new controls over the populace,” as a supporter of the French Communist Party, I plead not guilty. And a quick glance at the policies of the Russian and Chinese governments, and at articles at sites like the overtly communist http://www.spiked-online.com/ suggests that communists and ex-communists and neo-communists are too busy trying to improve the living standards of ordinary people to worry about such a nebulous concept as climate change.
This conspiracy-laden rhetoric—if followed to its logical conclusion— expresses a rejection of scientific methods, scientists, and the role that science plays in society.
No. It expresses a rejection of the anti-scientific methods employed by Cook, Lewandowsky and Douglas (all authors of articles here at the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, CLIMATE SCIENCE, and all proven liars and charlatans) and the role that they play in the perversion of the social sciences in the service of a delusional ideology.
Further on we find this:
.. individuals with elevated levels of conspiratorial thinking are more likely to deny the existence and severity of anthropogenic climate change (Lewandowsky, Cook, et al., 2015; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013, 2015; Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, 2013). While the effect of conspiratorial thinking on climate change attitudes pales in comparison to that of partisanship, the effect is nonetheless pernicious.
“Partisanship” to social scientists like Lewandowsky means voting for rightwing parties. People who vote right tend not to like taxes, and people who don’t like taxes tend not to like taxes to finance ludicrous renewable energy schemes, and tend to view plans to raise such taxes as a government conspiracy. And people who understand this stuff – engineers, accountants, and businessmen – tend to be the first to notice that climate alarmism is a huge scam. Which doesn’t prevent a motley bunch of marxists, libertarians and ordinary apolitical citizens like us at cliscep.com from coming to the same conclusion.
Note that “conspiratorial thinking” “pales in comparison” to political attitudes as a determinant of attitudes to climate change. It’s of minor importance. The authors say so, and they confirm it on page 2 when they say:
The voluminous research into opinions toward climate change indicates that people’s ideologies, that is, their set of deeply held worldviews, is largely responsible for the acceptance or denial of climate science (citing seven sources). Of particular note are studies showing that a general propensity to engage in conspiratorial thinking is also associated with opinions toward climate science: that is, individuals with elevated levels of conspiratorial thinking are more likely to deny the existence and severity of anthropogenic climate change. While the effect of conspiratorial thinking on climate change attitudes pales in comparison to that of partisanship, the effect is nonetheless pernicious. (citing three sources, all by Lewandowsky)
But that doesn’t stop them from rabbiting on about it for another 41 pages.
Since all the evidence for conspiracy theorising among climate sceptics (or “skeptics” as they spell it in Oxford) comes from papers from Lewandowsky, I think we can safely assume that the meat in the paper is written by him. For example this (p10)
Perhaps the most telling study of conspiracy talk is by Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013) and Lewandowky, Cook, et al. (2015). They examined the online comments that were made in response to their previous 2013 paper, “NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science” (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, et al., 2013). The authors noted that the study elicited an inordinate amount of controversy for an academic paper, and in measuring the commentary, they found much of it to contain conspiracy talk. For example, commenters accused Lewandowsky and his colleagues of faking data to make climate denialists look irrational. The analysis of these online criticisms and accusations of conspiracy became the basis of a published paper, “Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation.” The paper was retracted by the publisher (conspiracy theorists had threatened to sue); the paper was later retitled, additional data were reported, and it was re-published in 2015 at a different journal (Lewandowsky et al., 2015)
There are a couple of outright lies in this paragraph. 1) The authors didn’t “measure the commentary.” Two of them, Cook and Marriott, trawled a few thousand comments from scores of blog articles and extracted a hundred or so which they thought sounded conspiratorial, truncating them, misquoting them and attributing them to the wrong person. No measurement took place. 2) “The paper was retracted by the publisher (conspiracy theorists had threatened to sue)” suggests that the paper was retracted because conspiracy theorists had threatened to sue. This is false. Two individuals (Foxgoose and Jeff Id) wrote to the editors complaining about false statements attributed to them in the prepublished version of the paper, and pointing out that legal action might follow, as a result of which the paper was revised twice, with the embarrassing result that three different versions of the paper were available on the internet at the same time. There were no further threats to sue, but simply assertions by certain critics in letters to the journal editors (Steve McIntyre and me, and possibly others) that the article was defamatory.
But the interesting bit is this:
The paper was retracted by the publisher… the paper was later retitled, additional data were reported, and it was re-published in 2015 at a different journal (Lewandowsky et al., 2015).
I wrote up (Lewandowsky et al., 2015) at
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/new-triple-thickness-lew-paper/
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/mister-1-lew-screws-up-again/
and
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/googling-lew-repulsive-ferret-revisited/
I pointed out a number of lies in the article and noted that:
This must be the first time in the history of social research that the author has:
1) Admitted to deliberately altering his data
2) Deliberately hidden the source by suppressing names of websites and people quoted
3) Boasted that the data isn’t available.
But here in the OUP article, Lewandowsky goes further, claiming that (Lewandowsky, Cook et al 2015) is simply (Lewandowsky, Cook et al 2013) republished. This claim is of course, false. Republishing a retracted article is a serious scientific misdemeanor, and a cause for re-retraction. It’s not true, since the assertion that Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Jo Nova and I were paranoiac and incapable of rational thought has been removed, and similar assertions about dozens of other individuals, including Professor Richard Betts of the Meteorological Office have been hidden, since the supplementary materal for the 2013 article is no longer available for the 2015 “republished” version.
The OUP article must of course be retracted, since it is almost wholly based on three articles by Lewandowsky, one of which has been retracted, one of which should be retracted (according to Lewandowsky) and one of which is a load of bollocks. But how to break the news to the Oxford University Press? Should I simply send them a link to this article, or should I do something more academically acceptable?
Suggestions welcome.
Climate Scepticism 
It is readily apparent that the AGW believers are much more into the conspiracy thing than the skeptics, there apparently is not a (nonstate-owned) oil company anywhere that didn’t fund or defraud or something vaguely specified that is behind AGW or prevented people from discovering or copying with AGW etc etc etc. They share this mode of thinking with the anti-vaxers (big drug) and anti-GMO (Monsanto).
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With respect to paragraph 3:
“Climate skeptics suggest the well-publicized consensus is either manufactured or illusory and that some nefarious force—be it the United Nations, liberals, communists, or authoritarians—want to use climate change as a cover for exerting massive new controls over the populace.”
If you ever want an example of maybe not a nefarious force but at least an organization that wants to “use climate change as a cover for exerting massive new controls over the populace” may I call your attention to the Points of Unity for New York Renews (http://www.nyrenews.org/partners/):
Below are the nine points of unity that explain why we do our work, and linked here are the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing which guide how we do our work.
1. We seek a sustainable future for the earth and its people. We believe that all people have a right to live and make a living on a living planet.
2. We recognize climate change represents a serious threat to all and especially to vulnerable people such as workers, people of color, seniors, youth, and the poor. Governments at all levels need to act now because the warming planet puts prosperity out of reach for far too many.
3. We understand that unchecked corporate power jeopardizes a sustainable future. We support democratic and public control of the energy and finance sectors so that private interests never compromise the health and well-being of workers and our communities.
4. We can address both the climate crisis and the inequality crisis with the same set of policies. As the impacts of climate change mount, the crises of inequality and democracy will continue to grow.
5. We support rapid movement toward 100% clean renewable energy. We know what must be done. We have to shift away from extracting and burning fossil fuels and towards a lower carbon economy and fast. It is imperative that we recognize and achieve the targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction that climate science requires.
6. Climate protection must serve as a means to greater economic justice and stronger local economies. The jobs created by climate protection must be good jobs that respect workers’ right to organize. Jobs must be open and accessible to those who have been excluded from and discriminated against in the labor force. Likewise, small businesses and local economies should thrive in a new clean energy economy.
7. Climate protection must serve as a means to challenge environmental and racial injustice. We prioritize climate-vulnerable frontline communities and energy-insecure communities. Fairness and equity means the burden of policies that are necessary for society, like protecting the climate, shouldn’t be borne by a small minority who happen to be victimized by their side effects.
8. We must ensure economic security & job placement program for existing workers and young people. Workers employed in carbon-intensive industries should be guaranteed work in new industries and be provided strong social safety net benefits, including fully-funded retirement plans and free re-training opportunities. Young people benefit from career training for a wide-range of work opportunities in a clean energy future.
9. We must ensure community participation and oversight in decision making. To do that, there need to be resources and meaningful participation by community, labor, environmental justice, environmental, and other constituents.
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Geoff. I’m so very sorry but you will have to retract your post. It contains factual errors and you may be defaming me. You wrote
“Hands up anyone being paid by the carbon-based energy industry, or who has ideological reasons for opposing policies intended to address climate change, ……Anyone? No? So the whole article is revealed as belonging to Never Never Land”
But I get an oil-soaked pension from my evil days in the oil industry (where I took bribes in the form of a salary), and I have very strong ideological reasons (namely I think most renewables are an enormous waste of money and harm the environment) to youknow.
So your post contains errors and to avoid me suing you will need to be retracted, and revised. Such unwarranted criticism of a seeker after climate truth.
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The three authors are all on twitter. I wonder if this will get any sort of response:
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I see that this is an online collaboration, currently free as it is being built. However OUP already has a catalogue of hundreds of books on climate change, including one by that noted scholar Joseph Romm. The title is Climate Change and can be yours for £47.99.
For £38.99 you can get a book on Climate Change and the Future of Himalayan Farming.
You can learn about Climate Ethics for £83.
Climate Justice can be yours for a mere £46.49.
I wonder who buys these books. I spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago browsing in the OUP shop in Oxford. During that time I never heard the chime of a till opening. £115 seemed a lot of money to pay for a scholarly edition of Browning’s last volumes of poetry. Nothing else seemed worth buying apart from the very short introductions, some of which, obviously not Mark Maslin’s opus on Climate Change, are quite good. I imagine the press probably survives on its teaching materials, especially in the TEFL area
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Climate Justice..
2015-20: £1,050,000, Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme in Climate Justice: Ethics, Politics, Law.
an example. by the Professor, whose grant it is.
Should we tolerate Climate denial
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/misp.12056/full
you really have to read it all. and see why I say
oh dear – “I would like to thank Ed Hawkins and Patrick Tomlin for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.”
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Barry, her paper is full-on Lewandowsky. There appears to be nothing original about it. It even refers to the Sceptical Science website as an authority.
It seems much too easy to be an academic these days
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Hmm. I agree with much of what you have written–especially Lew and Cook, who are sitting ducks for almost anything negative anyone can say.
However, there have been surveys of climate scientists by climate scientists–notably Bray, von Storch et al 2008 and Verhgeggen et al 2012. In both surveys, 66% of respondents said they think that half or more of the recent warming is caused by humans.
Not 97%. Not that all warming is human-caused. But two-thirds of climate scientists think we’re responsible for at least half of the warming in recent decades.
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Mmm… By my climate science maths 2/3*50%~97%
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THOMASWFULLER2 (15 Nov 17 at 11:41 pm)
Their first sentence is a statement about predictions about the future, and it’s supported by no evidence at all. How could it be, since it’s vague to the point of meaninglessness? What doesn’t have deleterious consequences? What’s OUP doing publishing nonsense like this?
I don’t attack Lew and Cook because they’re sitting ducks, but because of the positions of power they’ve got themselves into. Seven years ago a professor at an obscure Australian university obtained permission to ask people questions about the economy in a shopping mall in Perth. He met an unemployed cartoonist who was musing about using spambots to place false comments on climate blogs. Now one’s at Bristol (thanks to the Royal Society) and the other’s at George Mason University; they’re on the boards of learned journals and scientific societies, and published by Oxford University Press. This matters.
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Thanks Barry for alerting us to this article.
Fortunately, Professor McKinnon’s efforts to deny deniers their basic human rights is unlikely to come to much, since she admits in her article that the deniers she’s talking about don’t exist. She says: “I do not mean by “climate denial” minority or outlier positions on aspects of climate science that lie within the range of normal and healthy disciplinary disagreement.” Her target is “industrial” climate denial financed by conservative think tanks and the fossil fuel industry, which employ scientists to deny the consensus. While elsewhere in the paper she says “Climate deniers are not scientists with beliefs about climate change that differ from scientists in the mainstream: climate deniers are not scientists at all.”
The two circles of her Venn diagram don’t meet, like the two halves of Professor McKinnon’s brain. Next thing she’ll be denying fairies the right to vote, or banning cruelty to unicorns.
This daft woman is “part of a group that is writing a report on recommendations for how we could globally govern Solar Radiation Management techniques, with a view to taking seriously concerns about the important ethical and justice issues raised by this new technology. The report will feed into the Carnegie Council’s Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative in order to get the attention of the intergovernmental policy community and international non-state actors in the coming years.” Got a problem with untried geoengineering techniques aimed at changing the course of humanity for centuries to come? Call on the Reading professor of climate justice.
You can read more about Professor McKinnon and what’s she doing with the million pounds at
https://www.reading.ac.uk/spirs/stories/spirs-c-mckinnon.aspx
Professor McKinnon says:
If only the Early Chiurch had had a million from the Leverhulme Trust. It might have made all the difference.
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Well I never, attend a University of Reading fully funded interdisciplinary doctoral scholarship in climate justice. In a matter of a few years(?) you will (somehow? Osmotically?) acquire the “knowledge and understanding required to contribute to the development and implementation of just climate policies”. Do you get special costumes and special powers? Does Professor McKinnon have a wheelchair?
What a load of claptrap. Who on earth would employ a Doctor of Climate Justice? (I am afraid to find out).
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Brad, where are you? This is taylor made for you (I shudder to think what your student of the Climate Justice league might conceive). Current topics of post-graduates at Reading may be viewed at
http://www.reading.ac.uk/climate-justice/ltcj-scholarsbiogs.aspx
It will make you weep, sigh or laugh out loud.
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Wow, a million quid from Leverhulme to study ‘climate justice’. To produce meaningless drivel like the paper Barry linked to – what does that even mean, “Should we tolerate climate denial”? What form would non-toleration take?
Reading certainly seems to be a centre for climate propaganda, with people like Ed Hawkins and Paul Williams as well as the social science clowns.
Incidentally, Reading is one of the unis that have been told off for misleading advertising. UEA is another!
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“Already, I go to conferences around the world and people say, ‘I met your student at so-and-so’.”
Excuse me? Climate justice? Greenhouse gases? “I go to conferences around the world”.
So cutting CO2 emissions is just something the little people have to do….
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one of the young people – doing a Phd, who i was having a very unproductive discussion with (she had a poster on advocacy and scientists – well I just looked her up.. “During this time, I also worked with the research team at Climate Outreach, looking at how to engage the public with climate change.”
(Adam Corner/George Marshall’s activist home) Basically if there is any ‘seepage’ in science. it is environmentalist activist tropes, seeping into academia.
Thomas:
ref: “Not 97%. Not that all warming is human-caused. But two-thirds of climate scientists think we’re responsible for at least half of the warming in recent decades.”
I have absolutely no problem with this, in fact I think higher.. IF Lew/Cook were promoting this, no problem. but theirs is a stick: “97% of scientists say (what exactly, the won’t say, not impacts, not solution, not even ‘dangerous’) so shut up, or you are a denier.
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“Should we tolerate climate denial”? What form would non-toleration take?
Indeed. they showed a film last Saturday – Greedy Lying Bastards – Exxon frequently is monstered, as is Rex Tillerson, it’s CEO.. I did point out that this has not aged well.. Given that Rex is now the USA Secretary of State… Caling him a lying bastard, is really not going to help persuade rex or anybody….
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You look at all this, how social scientists, political analysts, philosophers etc. have spread their tentacles into the field of climate change ‘science’, welcomed into the burgeoning self-satisfying, self interest Club by ‘scientists’ sitting at the sharp end who supposedly are justifying, with solid, scientific research, the ringing of the alarm bells re. the End of the Civilisation, and you realise what a monstrous betrayal of logic, reason, common sense, self-reliance, independent thought and natural justice it has all become. Yes, in place of all these admirable qualities which have characterised the Renaissance and the Industrial revolution which followed, we now have in place in academia a huge self-aggrandising, self-affirming, Club of ridiculously generously funded intellectual pygmies and group-think dead heads who arrogantly presume to lead us through the Valley of the Evil Anthropocene and out the other side into the fossil fuel free sunlit uplands of a Brave New World. God help us.
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Jaime. I will be going to UEA later today (haven’t been since July) and will look out for “intellectual pygmies and group-think dead heads”. What we need is a new Henry VIII, who will sweep aside these dens of climate malaise and our allegiance to the IPCC. Don’t think Chuck will cut it.
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ALAN KENDALL (16 Nov 17 at 8:38 am)
I suspect that one (or possibly several) of the students at the site you link to are Brad Keyes working undercover.
Professor McKinnon is right about one thing. It’s all about networking, establishing influence. These brainwashed weirdoes will spread out through academia and international bureaucratia, writing the reports that become the basis of the laws that decide who is allowed a voice in our Brave New 1.5°C World. It’s as if an unconscious deal has been struck between the Ayn Rand Right and the Stalinist Left. Private Enterprise gets the transport, electricity and water you use, and the State, aided by academia, gets to control your thoughts.
It will only come to an end when the Ponzi scheme that is the Green Blog stops expanding, and the postgrads on their Leverhulme grants find that there are no jobs waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.
From Professor McKinnon’s “story” page:
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“On the other hand, 113 out of 170 articles deal with Climate Change Communication,”
The ‘science communication’ industry has become huge. There’s a Conference today and tomorrow, in Washington, “The Science of Science Communication III: Inspiring Novel Collaborations and Building Capacity”.
Judging by the number of tweets on their hashtag #SacklerSciComm they have certainly succeeded in Building Capacity. Whether they’ve achieved anything else is not so clear.
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Just what we need in this crazy world – the next “cohort of climate justice experts”.
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McKinnon was one of those gripped by the methanous alarmism in a widely pooh-poohed 2013 paper in Nature by Whiteman, Hope and Wadhams. From a pre-pub version of her 2014 paper ‘Climate Change: Against Despair’, which she wrote while a visiting professor at a meteorological university in China and which was published shortly after she got back from a legal conference in Toronto, where she had asked whether climate change is an international crime:
(I can’t find a free version of the final paper but presumably it was changed to ‘in 15 months[‘] time’.)
The rest of the paper argued that, although we shouldn’t downplay such scientifically warranted doom and gloom or pretend that what lies ahead will be without sacrifice, doom, gloom and sacrifice are no reason to enter ‘a state of ostrich-like denial, or paralytic fear’. In particular, people should not assume that their personal carbon footprints are irrelevant because, philosophically speaking, they are not. Every little helps, at least from a philosophical point of view, she said.
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@Paul Matthews As it happens Catriona McKinnon was in Washington DC only two weeks ago. At a conference about geoengineering or something. I’ve lost the link.
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This summarizes the “deleterious consequences” of climate change.
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IOW, without climate change we humans would not have taken over. Our large brains enable us to adapt to ongoing changes. Except of course for alarmists, who have lost their marbles and must think with only a walnut.
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In this thread there is a complete failure to draw a bright line between the peer reviewed science (which does indeed conclude its man caused), and a variety of related topics on communications, Solutions, and climate justice. It’s dirty pool to impugn the credibility of the nearly unanimous findings of that research by arguing against the related topics, which do not inform the science.
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Warren Beeton, a warm welcome to Cliscep – in case nobody has said this yet!
On the dirty pool I suggest you take your cue from Geoff Chambers here:
Rather than Geoff playing dirty pool he is pointing to a crocodile-infested swamp which badly needs to be drained. When this has been done there’ll be plenty of time to assess peer-reviewed science, which has been veering away from dangerous man-made warming in the most recent studies of climate sensitivity, as Paul Matthews summarises nicely in our current main post. It’s whether and to what degree such warming is dangerous, and what the rational policy responses are, that matters, not whether man is causing some mild warming, which most of us would not dispute.
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” the credibility of the nearly unanimous findings of that research”
Yawn…
Only a short time ago there was nearly unanimous agreement that Weneger’s theory of Continental drift was total rubbish, and that colonic ulcers were caused predominantly by stress, and they are but two of the “established” theories that I have seen fail in the past half-century, and I’ll bet good money that the CAGW theory will fail too – is in fact failing even now, in fact.
Pardon me for being unimpressed by the concept of consensus science.
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“or who believes that anthropogenic climate change is not really happening”.
Having followed these issues since 1999, when I first discovered that Greenpeace and FoE told lies to further their agendas, I stick my hand firmly in the air.
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Oh I believe anthropogenic climate change is happening and that it can be documented (effect of irrigation in California as demonstrated by Christie). However, I see no evidence that its dangerous, some arguments that it may be beneficial, and nothing indicating we need to substantially and dangerously change our economies and lifestyles to offset its effects. I further think that the rest of science and our societies have been damaged and risk additional deterioration in the future by foolishly attempting to make changes to manage our climate. I believe the belief that we can manage nature is hubris at its most extreme. I increasingly find arguing with fearmongers about climate wearysome.
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