Did you know that the founder of skeptics magazine believes in AGW?

Question

"Michael Shermer was a well known global warming skeptic until he publicly changed his position in the June 2006 issue of Scientific American. He says: "Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming...Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance. [...]

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism."

Answer 1

Do we care?

Answer 2

Everyone who watches Al Gore's movie with an uncritical mind will be terrified by it and assume he wouldn't blatantly falsify and cherry-pick data. Once you find out that's what he did, the movie is then only frightening because of the impact it will have on the 'open' minds of schoolchildren and those who won't bother to educate themselves on this issue.

His hockey chart graph is a well-proven distortion that totally ignores both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age so they can show a relationship between CO2 and temp that is the inverse of what is actually observed. CO2 can raise temp but it usually goes up after temp has gone up.

Glaciers do tend to get smaller during interglacial periods, during the Medieval Warm Period explorers found the Arctic to be ice-free in the summers and that was nearly 1,000 years ago. Why would anyone be influenced by the opinion of someone who changed his mind on the basis of a movie?

The cost of reducing CO2 is horrendous and we don't even know that it will be a bad thing if the Earth gets warmer. $2.8 trillion to reduce US emissions by 25 ppm isn't a good investment. If it does get too warm, which is debatable given our currently inactive solar cycle, then CO2 sequestration would be far more economical and effective than gutting our industry and forcing prices still higher.

Answer 3

Yes, I knew that. I've read many of Dr. Shermer's books and met him in person at a skeptics conference.  He is a real skeptic, unlike the ideologues who merely feign skepticism.

"Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."

Here's a link to his article in Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-...

jazzman - The skeptics side simply didn't hold up to scrutiny when put before a scientifically savvy audience (like Shermer) and along side of scientists presenting the facts.

cindy - the Greenpeace guy does not deny global warming, he's simply seperated himself from the extremism of some environmentalists.  He advocates nuclear power as our best defense against global warming.  And the founder of the weather channel (not the current weather channel) is neither a scientist nor a particularly good businessman (as he was forced out of the weather channel because he was losing money).

Answer 4

See now that's a true skeptic - a person who is skeptical of the theory, but keeps an open mind and is capable of being convinced by scientific evidence.  I like this quote:

"Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism."

Well said.

jazzfan - the accuracy of the 'Hockey Stick' has been confirmed by many subsequent studies.

http://globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:2...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/p...

Criticisms of the 'Hockey Stick' were flawed:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/p...

And it was just a small part of the film anyway.  Shermer was convinced by the scientific evidence presented in the film, not just by 'some movie'.

Answer 5

But you still have the founder of Greenpeace and Weather Channel who both knows it is a hoax.

Guess he is going where the money is.

Give a scientist a living wage and he will give you knowledge.  Give him wealth and he will give you whatever you want.

Answer 6

the light is al powerful to those that but open their eyes