As the first commenter notes here, this is a sign of recognition that the warm mongers are recognizing that the unscientific “the science is settled” argument has failed, and they’re starting to slowly capitulate, though they continue to do so irrationally. As Judith notes, they continue to rely on the flawed precautionary principle, when the uncertainty remains far too high.
8 thoughts on “I’m Now A “Neoskeptic””
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But with your prominence in the transterrestrial community, why be a NeoSkeptic when you can be an ExoNeoSkeptic or a XenoNeoSkeptic, thus having more clout than a mere Earth-centric NeoSkeptic?
Haven’t looked up Mr. Plait lately, wonder if he’s still as disconnected from reality as in the past. Yep, still the same-old. (week and a half ago)
Comparing climate-change skepticism to abstinence-based sex-ed – check.
Head explosion from a congresswoman saying: Certainly Congress, when Pelosi was the speaker, had a select committee to investigate global warming and then they decided they would make it climate change. – check.
Hockey-stick champion-to-the-end: And by the way, the “hockey stick” is not a theory; it’s a set of reconstructed temperature measurements going back thousands of years, showing that the rate the planet is warming is unprecedented for many millennia. – check
Way to go Phil, stick in there, your reality distortion field will win through in the end.
Yeah, reconstructed temperature measurements based on tree ring growth which are a better proxy for water & nutrient levels than for temperature, but what do we know?
But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision.
One could even say nonscientific factors are what started the conversation. As in, science wasn’t what started the environmental movement nor is it what guides their prescribed policies.
Personally, I consider myself a “Lukewarmist.” I don’t see how going from 1 billion people in 1900 to over 7 billion today, could not have affected the climate, but I ‘m not a watermelon (green outside, red inside). I’ve always viewed GW as a technical, not a social problem. It’s the watermelons who want to make it societal problem, so they can hammer capitalism and engage in a real-world imitation of an Ayn Rand novel.
We’ve certainly affected the climate in areas where we have congregated. But, next time you fly across country, note how much of the area you see out the window is uninhabited. We’re still not at a point where we are having an appreciable global impact. It just looks that way to us because we are surrounded by… us.
Moreover, it is by no means a given that the ways we have impacted it have been bad overall. It hasn’t been bad for the termites and cockroaches. It hasn’t been bad for dogs and cats. It’s been bad for trees in some areas, but if you’ve ever seen an abandoned farmhouse completely engulfed by vegetation within a fairly short time, or a lush forest growing where one was completely obliterated by fire some years previous, you know that nature is pretty voracious, and can only be held at bay by constant effort.
Personally I prefer the term: neopanopticskepticon.
Were I truly precocious, I could have said:
supercalifragilisticneopanopticskepticon
but I think that’s taking it a bit too far, don’t you?