Professional Skeptics

Wired News: Funding a Global-Warming Skeptic

Besides such "experts" who are bought and paid for, there are also indications that the media’s bend-over-backwards neutrality (but the Global Warming debate has two sides!) is more a function of sponsorship, industry pressure, and outright laziness (remember the VNR scandal from the spring?) than any attempt at fairness.

The fact of the matter is that there is no debate. The CO₂ levels have shot up. The climate is getting warmer. Every credible scientist agrees. Even if there is a natural long-term cycle to contend with, the changes we’re seeing are so rapid, so sudden, and so steep, that there is no doubt that they are man-made. A long-term natural cycle could help or hurt the man-made trend, but it can’t explain the unprecedented increases. At this point, we’re past the diagnosis and should be well into mitigation and crisis management.

I’ll challenge any global warming skeptic out there to find a single scientist (defined as having a Ph.D in a field intimately tied to climatology and at least one paper in a respectable peer-reviewied journal) who denies global warming who is not in some way bought and paid for by an industry that profits from doing nothing to solve the problem. I’ll bet you can’t find even one that isn’t funded by the industry.

And I have to ask once again, why are conservatives on the wrong side of this issue? Conservatism should include conservationism–keeping what we have–and risk management–preventing loss. The most I’ve heard from them is some head scratching on how best to profit from global warming.

Hint: invest in air conditioning and boats.