Global warming denialism.
We’ve had a surge of anthropogenically forced climate change denialism lately, the stolen email incident even made it to Daily Show (the only news program I watch). In case anyone’s doubted, they have exactly as much scientific credibility as AIDS denialists or the “vaccination causes autism” movement.
Of course, quite a few politically-motivated environmentalists made stuff up where science was too boring, but even Al Gore’s infamous “Inconvenient Truth” has ten times less factual errors than one global warming chapter of Lomborg’s “Skeptical Environmentalist”. Personally, I think pressuring people into feeling environmental anxiety and guilt is just as amoral as slandering climatologists (actually, I think a rational person should never experience guilt at all), but whether people deny or stretch the observed facts doesn’t change the facts in the least.
And since I’ve been running into internet discussions about this issue here and there, here are a collection of rebuttals by topic, partly for my own reference.
Responses to common contrarian arguments at RealClimate, the most in-depth blog on this topic, since it is ran by actual climatologists: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and others.
How to talk to a GW skeptic at IllConsidered, blog by Coby Beck, an AI software engineer.
Skeptic Arguments by taxonomy at SkepticalScience, blog by John Cook, a solar physicist.
Climate Chainge: A guide for the perplexed by New Scientist magazine, bad as it became.
Crossposted from LiveJournal