Why is it that this empty, stuffed man is never challenged by the Skeptics community, and why is Bjorn Lomborg never given a hearing despite the fact that he has done his homework and his citations check out?

The result of this was that I was skeptical about the reality of anthropogenic climate change for years after that. I continued to read the actual studies rather than rely on headlines and discovered the headlines almost always got what the studies said wrong, not matter which way the study went. I quickly found out how and why the ice cores still indicated AntroCC, but the damage was done. I am now convinced, but the damage that things like that and climategate do is never-ending. They provide plausible deniability to those that do not wish to be convinced. This is just the same as the arguments against evolution. They are not designed to actually provide valid scientific arguments, they are designed to give those that do not wish to believe a loophole for their disbelief.

No, I think Gore’s time has past.

Former Skeptics repeat after me: “I am an informed opponent of the Alarmist global warmingclimate change positionmovement” (Use which ever phrasing you feel is appropriate).

Skeptics are skeptical because it’s easy to be skeptical once you examine the actual science.

Using political connections and manufactured consent can make you very, very rich in a short amount of time.

The book and/or movie has not been announced yet, but it will be soon. Right now we’re in the phase of the marketing campaign where naive media outlets report on it like its a political movement.

After this initial news cycle winds down, expect the book to be announced..

The book and/or movie has not been announced yet, but it will be soon. Right now we’re in the phase of the marketing campaign where naive media outlets report on it like its a political movement.

After this initial news cycle winds down, expect the book to be announced.

That’s an extremely foolish attitude.

Okay. Sorry, I’ll be more serious when people be more clear in their language. We are talking about scientific and political concerns, both of which are seriously affected by language. So to keep from getting into an extremely negative attitude when people use unclear language, unclear understandings of politics or science, and unclear logic in their arguments based on those understandings and language, I will be foolish.

When people say “negatively affecting the planet”, they mean, or at least, they should mean, “negatively affecting the habitability of the planet from human point of view”. There are no guarantees that humans can figure out how to adapt to the changing conditions.

Yes, there are. We just can’t guarantee that we can do it without significant loss of human life, which is bad. We have adapted to changing conditions before. We can adapt to changing conditions again if they happen slowly and without sudden spikes of extremely violent shift. Even with extremely violent shift, humans, as a species, were BORN out of climate change, forcing our ancestors out of the savanna into a coastal region of Africa where possibly as few as a thousand of us remained alive. Yet we survived, adapted, evolved, and came back better than ever. We were weaker than our cousins, the Neanderthal, but faster and smarter. We were smaller and weaker than the megafauna of North America, but still able to kill more of them then they could kill of us.

There can be a shift that would kill us off, you are right about that, but nothing like that has been predicted with any certainty as happening in the foreseeable future (with the exception of a couple of asteroids). There are still plenty of suggestions that we will outsmart any of those problems by diversification of thought, culture, ideology, and, ultimately, thought.

Individual humans are intelligent enough to solve simple to somewhat complex problems. Some humans are intelligent enough to solve very complex problems. But collectively, humanity is extremely stupid, to the point that even the simplest things that are crucial to human survival are often not even noticed.

There is nothing that makes humans stupider as a group. You are wrong about that. What they are is different. Different people have different opinions and only by learning to accept that there are different opinions will be create a truly free and cooperative world. One somewhat flippant definition of intelligence is the ability to hold multiple opinions at once. The joke goes that “if you get 3 (fill in the blank) experts, you will get 5 opinions/models/explanations/etc”. By that model, humans as a group are extremely intelligent. What we aren’t is herd or eusocial animals will work as a solid group toward a single goal except in single moments of extreme need or desire. Humans have made the most progress not during “sputnik moments” but during the rest of the time where a thousand ideas a second are pursued together.

We will not solve global warming by collective action. We will probably not solve at all. What we will do is we will find workarounds that mitigate the threats, or not and people will suffer. We will find technology that doesn’t cause the excess inputs into the carbon cycle, but the damage will be done and will have effects (neither good nor bad) on Earth’s environment for centuries to come, just like agriculture has had for thousands of years. We will accomplish much not by trying to rein in human progress but pushing it forward. The pollution needs to be controlled to prevent harm to humans or valuable ecosystems (to humans). We need to mitigate the harm on all species because we don’t know what the loss of those species will mean to humans.

And not only are there no guarantees that humans can figure out how to adapt, there are no guarantees that it is even possible to do so. In fact, there are very good reasons to think that we will drive ourselves to extinction. So why take the chance?

No one ever said we should. I don’t think that there is any evidence that we may drive ourselves to extinction. We may be in a Golden Age of human progress today and tomorrow will change, but there is no evidence that the human biome is seriously threatened in any way. As for why take the chance, I drive a hybrid for environmental reasons only to find out its worse for the environment altogether. Can you guarantee that the plans that you have to help fix the problem won’t make it worse? What if just driving our economy forward a few more years will make the breakthrough that makes new chemical batteries that can provide a higher energy density than gasoline with a rapid charging time? What if by stifling energy use, we slow down the economy and suddenly government are having budget shortfalls and stop funding ITER and other energy research? Of course, there is the what if by letting energy use go whole hog, we never explore alternatives until its too late to make any transition without a significant loss of life due to economic collapses. We can’t predict it so I choose to rely on enlightenment ideals, such as the idea of progress (the march of science will make the world better) and the idea of liberalism (the government operates only by the will of the people and respect for individual rights to life, liberty, and property are the only way to preserve the people from tyranny)

You’re wrong. We have become intelligent enough to outcompete all other organisms on the planet. We haven’t become intelligent enough to realize that this is not in our best interest.

Glad you solved that puzzle for us. You seem to have become intelligent enough to realize it isn’t in our best interests, yes? Are you human? You seem to want all humans to operate like a single organism while evolutionary adaptability (what I was speaking about) relies only on breeding individuals from species surviving based on adaptions, not on the species acting in concert to achieve it. Who knows, maybe we are just getting ready to build the next stage in our evolution. By creating a massive equilibrium shift in the world’s environment, we kill off all but a handful of survivors who get by by their wits and ability to use technology toward their survival.

It sounds like an excellent plot for a book. Old humans, away on a long, relativist journey come back to find that a new species has come to dominate the planet in the interim… wait, Pierre Boulle did that one, didn’t he?