Michael Hardner

You seem to support an idea that he's lying to make money for himself, though ? And you're bringing it into a climate discussion. Can we discuss climate change effectively without bringing Al Gore's personality into it ?

Even normal operational information though, such as the size of waiting lists, isn't available - and isn't demanded by the public. We're too complacent.

What it means is that something that was published in 1991, saying there wasn't enough evidence may have changed by 1997. My opinion is that we should be able to determine a course of action without the character sketches that people insist on piling onto their arguments. Now - does your argument stand if Gore isn't an evil conspirator or not ?

And there is the exact same type of mistrust on the other side, which is why we need a way forward. If we don't have a significant number of people behaving in an honest and positive way, we're screwed anyway so ...

The public doesn't need to understand the complexities, but they have to have a proxy who does understand them. If the skeptics have any point at all, then some scientist somewhere should represent them. Unfortunately, this isn't science - it's science on the backs of politics so the claims of the skeptics have to be acknowledged and reviewed in a factual way.

There is the little matter of the passage of years in between these events. But, Gore MUST be evil in order for your argument to make sense, right ?

No there doesn't. This is a PR problem first and foremost, not a science problem. As such, it's no longer a useful tactic to point to ideology. It's time to get rid of divisive language and find a way forward.

The uninformed need to have their opinions swayed, and if Climate Science doesn't think it's important to do so, then climate skeptics will. This article from Huffington understates the amount of damage this revelations would do to those who have no context to how the scientific community works. Although I do think that the damage to the science has been overstated, the damage to public opinion hasn't.

Thread drift !

2% is very little. Our productivity grows, on average, more than 2% per year. Stats Canada - Productivity Growth - See Table 1

It's essential to change the scope of Climate Science so that it acknowledges climate skeptics, however it will still have to be scientists talking to scientists.

You're dead right about this, bjre. The Canadian people are irresponsible when it comes to talking about, and monitoring the level of their healthcare services.

We've gone over this territory many, many times jbg and no one has ever explained how a religion causes violence, on these boards. The best we've done is to have emotional bleating (a la Wulf) about 'radical Islam' but nothing of substance comes out of those discussions: no conclusions about policy change, no convincing explanation of the relationship between religions, cultures, and violence.

Uh.... right. Ok. I didn't see these. Give me a link, but in the meantime I recant.

You're not as pessimistic as Oleg either.

So when did they figure out that there was more money to be made ? Before the scientists started cooking the numbers or after ? Who planned the whole thing ? The whole plot, I mean ?

And that was the intention from the beginning I take it - to make Al Gore and Whoopi Goldberg wealthy ? Maybe the world's scientists are selfless after all, I mean they cared so much about Al and Whoopi that they put aside all ethics to work for their cause...

Pliny, here's an example of a poster who submits this as a grand conspiracy to make Al Gore rich.

It's also possible to engage private industry to get work done, and desirable in fact. Such is the case with the road building example from earlier in the thread.

Those are but two skeptics, though. There may as well be reasonable 9/11 truthers too - except I haven't met them. Except for the "hide the decline" line, which may still be innocuous, there's nothing in the emails that show they're not honest.

It's very easy to find claims of fraud, conspiracy, and so on - all of which imply planned deception. On these boards, people will imply that scientists are working for their own material gain, and that the GW movement is really a socialist movement disguised as an environmental movement. None of this is helping in getting through the facts presented, and it sows distrust of either side, turning this into an US vs THEM debate. It's very easy to see why they would overstate their case when constantly engaging in dialogue with others who do so. This is another reason why having web skeptics and scientists dialogue together is a bad idea - they don't speak the same language. The skeptics should nominate scientists to represent their views, and feed them suggestions on weak points in the IPCC papers.

Maybe they grew tired of skeptics refusing to accept their findings. They're only human after all. I myself had to give up on the infuriating 9/11 conspiracy people to a degree, although I'll still wade in from time to time.

Anybody who refers to conspiracies, oil company shills, or groups of bespeckled plotters with tiny beads of sweat on their bald heads rubbing their hands together.

But that's already built in to the peer review system. There's not much else you can do, and certainly other professional bodies (and politicians for that matter) have less control and monitoring over what they do. You can't build a system that assumes 100% trust, but you can't have one that assumes 0% either. In any case, when we're discussing the points themselves (as opposed to how the system should be designed) then the argument should stand on its evidence alone.

Actually, it's almost as dramatic as Hamlet. What will happen now ?