Translation - MY FAITH IS BIGGER AND THEREFORE MORE VALID THAN YOURS!
Of course, skepticism about man-made global warming has what, nothing, to do with all the fudged data, coverups, outright lies and quite frankly, cold winters that have transpired? There was no reason to continue reading after that point.
Investigate Climategate first.
Those who claim to have the historical data also claim "the dog ate it". Where is impartial peer review?
Don't trust those who communicated with their fellow scientists to blacklist the skeptics in the scientific community.
Sorry, but I stopped reading right there. That is such a loaded and tendentious term. And it's a straw man. There is no such thing as a climate change denier.
What I care about, ALL I care about, are NUMBERS. What are the numbers, and where did they come from? How much has the temperature risen or fallen, based on what data from what sensors, and WHEN? How long have we been measuring by hundredths of a degree, and how widespread and consistently calibrated are the sensors? And PLEASE don't give me ice-core findings from back then when you're doing .01 degree gradations now.
And don't get me going on sea levels. Good luck getting longtudinal gradations on that. No one has yet figured out a way to do it, so anyone who says they have is highly suspect of being an agenda scientist.
Lastly, since we are getting more and more removed chronologically from the last ice age, I would intuitively expect some warming as a natural course of events.
"This is a symptom of movement conservatism’s larger problem of rejecting authority and expertise as the product of elitist thinking."
We seem to see that attitude everywhere these days.... whether the topic is climate science, Tea Party politics, or Sarah Palin's presidential aspirations.
Moran might have made more clear that "conservative" objections to climate change science are often more based in politics and ideology, than on scientific reasoning (cf. the dissertaitions on the topic by noted scientist Dr. Limbaugh).
What Moran calls "movement conservatism," though, is really nothing more than a rehashed populism. Over the past 20 years or so, "movement conservatism" has essentially abandoned the intellectual approach epitomized by the work of William F. Buckley or Russell Kirk. Conservative principles (and also the name "Reagan") are invoked like magic words.
2. If the earth is warming is it natural or man-caused?
3. If it is natural is it associated with known short or long term natural cycles? Many climate scientists hate any reference to the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age because they show that there were climate changes before industrialization. Additionally we just left an ice age about 12,000 years ago. Are we still in the natural warming period or are we supposed to have reached a maximum temperature?
4. If it is man-made, how bad will it be? A tenth of a degree temperature increase and an inch higher water level isn't enough to make major changes over.
All of the funding goes to those who say global warming exists, it is man-caused and it will be really, really bad. If your research gives the wrong answers (or even seriously asks the wrong questions) you don't get funding in the future. Many of the principles of publishing complete data and experimental methods were put into place to prevent funder driven science.
My son just came back from a visit to Ireland, where he was told that people in Ireland must register each tv that they have in their homes and pay a $70/yr for each tv. He said that they have inspectors that randomly visit each house and search for tvs and even if you have a tv in your basement thata is not being used, you will get fined if it is not registered. That’s why Ireland has such low income taxes, they have all these other global warming taxes.
Okay. If they want to go that way, we need to redo “climate research” from ground up.
1. Reform grant funding. Nothing distorts science so much as the expectations of the entities providing the grants. Funds for climate research must be “masked” so that the researchers don’t know where they’re coming from and limited so that “researchers” can’t make global warming their career.
2. All participants in climategate must excluded from the research and from any grants. Their dishonesty is proven, and their research is, by definition, questionable.
3. All previously collected data are suspect. Throw out all existing data and collect new data. All raw data must be preserved and made available to anyone who wants it.
4. All existing models are suspect. New models must be created from the ground up. The source code, parameters and assumptions of the model must be preserved and available to other researchers. Models must pass a results check, predicting past, present and future climate change with equal accuracy.
No, there's other reasons. Like falsified data. False assumptions. The more FACTS one reads, the more that they see that Global Warming is a hoax.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/ for a great deal of information on the subject.