RealClimate.org Scientist Stirs Up the Hicks

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NPR broadcast a debate over whether global warming is a crisis last year. It's pretty funny at one part. If you download the edited version, at around 24:00 you can hear an exchange about cosmic rays. Gavin Schmidt, one of the lead contributors to the "consensus" website RealClimate, then says something like, "This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. To the untrained layman, it sounds like you and I are now having a real debate about the science. But I know that that's not true, and so do you [the denier scientist]. But they don't know that you're leading them astray."

After the moderator asks Schmidt if he's saying the deniers aren't sincere, Schmidt gives an answer and the crowd takes offense. I can understand why, because (not in so many words, but almost) he basically said that he's mad that the scientists on the other side are purposely phrasing things in ways that they know the boobs in the audience won't be able to follow.

In the interests of objectivity, I should also say that I was aghast at Michael Crichton's opening remarks. He spent a lot of time on the hypocrisy of current alarmists, and how it's a travesty that we're focusing on climate change rather than fighting malaria or whatever. C'mon Crichton stick to the science. You can think people are hypocrites, liars, shills for oil/government in private, but all of that is irrelevant in a public debate. Or at least, it ought to be.

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