Why I'm A Climate Change Skeptic

Perhaps there is a good explanation for this, but if so I would like to hear it:

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

This is not an uncommon event. The government sanctioned panels that are quoted in the media now blatantly exclude and ignore dissenters to the point that I don't think they are scientific bodies at all anymore. They are more like a College of Cardinals from the Middle Ages, intent on enforcing doctrine rather than scientific inquiry. And so as the planet cools, contrary to every existing model about climate change, we get rhetoric about 6th warmest, 7th warmest, 8th warmest, instead of an acknowledgment that this year was cooler than last. The doctrine must be maintained!

Honest scientists are not afraid to have their theories challenged and confront contradictory evidence head on. Theologians, as history has proved, not so much. It's kind of a telltale as far as which one you are dealing with. I am willing to look at all of the evidence, I am not a "denier", an epithet that only a person of faith, not science, would hurl. The problem for me is not the observations that seem to support human caused climate change, but the way that the many contradictory observations are ignored or dismissed out of hand. That's not science, that's faith.

Or something even worse.

Comments

[Rob]

Sounds like the Telegraph's Booker is a skeptic, too. I'd like to read a little more science and a lot less zealotry. Like you, I'm not entirely sold on global warming but I know that some of the experts who are advancing that theory are respected scientists, not crackpots or idealogues. There's just too much noise on both sides and it's amplified by politics.

[Dave E.]

Yeah, there's plenty of noise all around. I was going to post on that "suppressed" EPA report and then read some things that made me doubt that that angle was 100% kosher. I think there's something to it, but not all that is being advertised.

I think what you say about experts is true on both sides. The debate is far more vigorous than I think most people know. That's why I bristle when people say there is a "consensus" about climate change. There's no such thing and the people who say that there is one are simply trying to cut off debate.