Decius wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:
Well first things first, he's wrong about the grants. People like Exxon give grants too, so that's not right.

You sound like a Republican. :) In the U.S., at least, almost all basic science funding is federal. The argument that Exxon gave out a grant or two as a response to an accusation of bias in terms of federal grant awards is no more reasonable than the argument that California is funding stem cell research as a response to complaints about the federal ban on funding for said research. Let them eat cake?

I don't know much about climate science but I do know a bit about materials, where catch phrases like "nanotechnology" are used to raise money for research projects which, while important, have nothing to do with atomic assembly and machinery, and I also know a bit about quantum physics, where catch phrases like "quantum teleportation" fool politicians who think they are paying for research into star trek transporters. One does not have to be a "Global Warming denier" to conclude that the threat of Global Warming might be used in a misleading way by the atmospheric science community in order to raise money for projects that don't really relate to it. This works regardless of what you are studying or what results your funding sources expect.

Tom, you're obfuscating the point. Virtually no one on the scientific side continues to say the earth is not getting hotter, and a slightly larger minisculity (yes, I invented a word to make a point) says people have nothing to do with it. The people that do are being rightfully tossed to the side of the road to land next to the flat earthers, creation scientists and intelligent designers. The difference here is the same as the issues pushed by those creationists and designers, they find someone who goes along with them, pump their message into a megaphone and yell that there is "controversy!"

I call bullshit. There is argument about the level of human involvement, the size of the impact, but the question about it happening is dead. The question about it is what happens next. Do we get continued warming and worldwide coastal flooding? Does continued warming cause the gulf current to break and plunge the northern hemisphere into an ice age ala "The Day After Tomorrow." Nobody knows the answers to those questions. What we DO know is that those results are going to be not beneficial to what we know of now. Full continental drought in North America? That's entirely possible. Doing modeling of something like this is a lot of guesswork, and the historical data for what comes next is inferential.

Saying people on the other side of the issue don't get money though is baloney. Distracting the topic, with something clearly disprovable (and disproven) is grand theft oxygen, and we want it back so we can get on with a discussion of how to actually fix the problem.

RE: Gore Gets A Cold Shoulder