What dishonesty Tom? You read the data, all of it, not just the sanitized bits and make your own concuions. Many of us have done just that and are not convinced. Just because we don’t sing from the same song book as you does not make us dishonest. There is a hell of a lot more grey in all of this than the black and white you would want us to see.

Do I worry about climate change? No. Becuase I think that worring about it is counterproductive. If we are faced with the perils that some people wold have us believe, we would be better off figuring out how to adapt.

In it he makes many of the same points as I have been trying to make – though more eloquently and from a position of much more expert knowledge. To quote: “It is important that on big questions such as climate change scientists make an assessment of what they know at key moments when policy or other collective decisions need to be made. Today is such a time.[...] What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy; it is whether we have sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered.”

It seems to me that you and your fellow idealogues at Spiked are making determined efforts to prevent such foresight and wisdom from being exercised. I think this is because you have a narrowly (and foolishly) ideological perspective which you are unwilling to alter in the light of the best available scientific knowledge. And I find the dishonesty with which you pursue this agenda to be pretty sickening.

I don’t remember, and I just checked, making any rude or demeaning statments towards you. You are entitled to draw your own conclusions about the data presented in any forum.

Frankly, I am growing weary of the constant barrage of insults thrown at those of us who doubt manmade climate. It belittles not only the person who is attacked, but also the person who wields the knife.

You make a clear point that scientists should not be expected to ignore the human implications of their findings. What happens when scientist’s findings are out of kilter with the ‘consensus’? They get called holocaust deniers. They are accused of being funded by a conspiracy orchestrated by oil companies. Their political motivations are called into question. You seem to argue that scientists are human too – until they have an opinion which you disagree with, at which point they become evil.

Can we remind you of Mike Hulme’s comments about catastrophism?

‘I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric… Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science’s predictions?’ – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm

Is he as bad as a holocaust denier, in spite of his comments that ‘Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change’?

May we suggest that you stick to criticising what we are saying rather than speculating wildly about why we are saying it.

If you (and the editors of this blog) really believe that most of the world’s climate scientists are involved in some kind of cosy conspiracy to cover up or exaggerate the facts, then I suggest you take an open-minded look at realclimate.org, where ‘the science per se’ is debated critically and in depth by well-qualified people. It’s possible that you might learn something about scientific integrity from doing so – though I have to say that this does not seem likely.

Like holocaust deniers, climate ‘sceptics’ seem to take any evidence that contradicts their ideologically determined position as further proof of a far-reaching conspiracy. The more I see of this mind-set, the better Caroline Lucas’s analogy seems to be.

Nobody made big news out of previous events becasue there was no single hook to hang the hat on, now we have it and its called anthropogenic global warming.

I think the only thing not attributed to AGW is critical thinking, indeed the two are mutually exlusive.

The key word here is “unfounded”. If the science on which calls to action such as that of the RS and the other academies is in fact well founded, then the sense of urgency would appear to be amply justified. Perhaps that is why you prefer not to talk about ‘the science per se’?

To expect scientists to ignore the human implications of their own findings seems to me absurd – after all, they are as human as the rest of us. Science and politics have of course always been intimately connected, since science offers the best available means of understanding how the world works and thus how to shape it to our advantage. But I think you are quite wrong to suggest that either the academies or the many climate scientists whose work underpins their statement are driven by any narrow political agenda. They are simply pointing out the glaringly obvious implication of their findings: if we go on pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the present rate then we are letting ourselves and future generations in for very serious trouble.

The ways in which we might drastically reduce such emissions are of course a matter for political debate and decision-making. But that process is not going to be assisted by the efforts of people like yourselves to suggest that the science itself is ill-founded.

I think the only reason you are doing this is because you feel your own ideology (of unrestricted economic growth) to be threatened by the science. It is you, far more than the Royal Society, who are guilty of putting a rigid political agenda ahead of scientific integrity.

The consensus statements made jointly by the various science academies are not a scientific consensus, but a political consensus among science academies. The two are very different.

You make an arguable point about Bob May’s description of CO2 as the principal greenhouse gas. But we made the point amongst a number of others – chiefly that May was arguing that to challenge his authority is to ‘disrespect the facts’, is to somehow do the work of oil companies. Never mind the ambiguity of May’s choice of language, what is scientific about his argument? It’s a highly charged political statement that scientific questions are not legitimate because they are a symptom of the corrupting influence of big business.

Our point is that if you are self-appointed custodians of the scientific facts, you have to be especially careful how you wield them to suit your own purposes. Are we to assume that that is your only quibble with our criticisms of the RS?