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Can we be assured that the Vatican will continue this policy after the hubub of the latest sex abuse scandals has died down? My suspicions are that the reforms are damage control that didn't begin until they realized that it couldn't be swept under the rug any more. What's especially troubling is that the reform announcements put the blame on homosexuals entering the seminaries, and claimed that they could identify homosexuals and keep them out in the future! This is despicable blame-shifting, because the most common violations of proper priestly conduct are with women, not preteen and adolescent boys! Women who go to a priest for counseling are often coerced into sexual relationships, but since women (such as the recently widowed) are of age and a priest is not professionally licensed as a therapist, there are no charges to be filed for taking advantage of women in vulnerable situations, even when the priest gets the woman pregnant. The Church usually quietly makes a child support arrangement, and only in rare cases, such as one here in Hamilton two years ago, where a woman was suing the Church for continued support because her son was disabled -- does the sex scandal even make the news. The Silent Majority: Adult Victims of Sexual Exploitation by Clergy Considering that this organization is always looking for opportunities to re-establish the power they enjoyed centuries ago, all of their records should be available for public scrutiny! http://www.concordatwatch.eu/ Pope launches team to 're-evangelise' the West

First of all, how many non-citizens are living in Israel? Israel seems to have a substantial illegal immigration problem...just like every country that wants keep wages down and erode union organizing. This Time article tells the story about several thousand who live mainly in the area around Tel Aviv, and have been arriving since Israel's other source of cheap labour -- the Palestinian day workers have been shut out since the 2nd Intifada. Somebody has to do menial jobs for low wages, and it seems that migrants from the Far East are filling in for the Palestinians. As for Israel's Arab citizens -- whether you feel the restrictions are justified or unjustified, there is no argument against the fact that Israel's Arabs have had their personal rights chipped away ever since independence, when they were guaranteed full and equal rights of citizenship. Besides travel, work and education restrictions,Non-Jewish citizens are barred from owning 93% of the land, which is reserved for Jews, both foreign and domestic. Full equality of citizenship cannot be resolved in a state that is designed for one specific religion and ethnicity. And the strategy that Ariel Sharon started, of unilaterally expanding Israel's borders into the West Bank,creates more 2nd class citizens on the other side of 20 foot walls that divide neighbourhoods. West Bank residents must maintain Israeli Defense Force-issued permits, or face deportation....exactly where, I'm not sure! Over the decades, there was an attempt to portray Israel as fully democratic, but the other requirement -- to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, and a home for all Jews of the Diaspora, inevitably means that the rights of Israel's non-Jews have to yield to the primary objective. The reason why things have gotten so ugly over the last 30 years is that the majority have resolved that eternal war, Arab hostility, and international isolation, are the price to be payed to preserve a Jewish state. So, whether or not you feel that Israel has no choice other than restricting Arabs and driving them off more land, the Apartheid analogy is valid. South Africa's Apartheid policies were created based on the argument that the whites wouldn't survive if full equality was granted to blacks; likewise you can be damn sure that Israel will continue to erode the status of Palestinians as they carve out more and more territory on the West Bank. As Israel expands its borders, full equality becomes an even more remote possibility.

Laws against abortion will certainly force continuing pregnancy! I wanted to provide a real example of where societal needs may require interfering with personal autonomy. And of course, there are relatively few abortions after that 20 week period of gestation, because a normal clinic abortion is not possible. Aside from some of these tragic cases of underage girls who either didn't understand or tried to hide the fact that they were pregnant, most women who seek a late term abortion, intended to have a baby, but are seeking an abortion for medical health reasons. So if it's a pregnant young woman of modest means who can't afford to pay for an abortion, she brings a baby she didn't want into this world....how does that help us again? The defunding of abortion is a ruse by the right to close off this option to poor women and girls, while middle class and higher will still be able to take care of the "problem." In some U.S. states where there is no funding for abortion, and abortion clinics have been hounded out of existence, many women who claim to be pro life, admit that they have had at least one abortion during their lives. For some reason they consider their circumstances unique! And they or their families had the means to get them to a state that had a functioning abortion clinic. My suspicions are that the so called pro life movements in this country or the U.S., would not want to push for a blanket ban on abortion, because the present status quo gives them everything they want! They can rail about the sin of abortion and those poor, defenseless unborn babies -- while the upper middle class that supports the religious right and fiscal right wing, still have that abortion option available, if necessary. On the subject of choice, here's an interesting new wrinkle in this old problem that was featured in an ABC News story: Men Who Abuse Their Partners Often Sabotage Birth Control, New Research Suggests Nearly 20 percent of women at family clinics across northern California reported that their partner tried to coerce them into having a child, sometimes using methods such as poking holes in condoms or flushing birth control pills down the toilet, Dr. Elizabeth Miller of the University of California Davis and colleagues reported online in the journal Contraception. It's also a way for males to make their partners more dependent on them, according to Amy Bonomi of Ohio State University. "Women in abusive relationships are sometimes forced to bear children as a means to keep them dependent on their partner and sometimes as a means to justify additional -- and sometimes more severe -- abuse," Bonomi said. Miller said pregnancy coercion often consists of verbal threats, demands, and physical violence to pressure women to become pregnant. Alternatively, some men sabotage birth control by flushing pills down the toilet, breaking condoms, or removing contraceptive rings and patches. "We've known for a long time in the domestic violence world that partner violence and unintended pregnancy are connected; we just haven't understood the mechanisms," Miller said. And then all the god-fearing prolifers, bibles in hand, wonder why there are women out there seeking abortions!

All right, that's enough! I'm going to start puking my guts out if you guys don't knock it off with this bullshit about 'what a wonderful democracy Israel is!' First of all, it's an apartheid state -- any way you cut it, you can't have a true democracy with a large disenfranchised population. Didn't work for South Africa, doesn't work for Israel either. Next: just being Jewish, does not mean you are accepted as an Israeli. For example, there have been problems for years as the European Jewish population has had to deal with the increasing Sephardic Jews, but the tiny Ethiopian Jewish population has never been accepted as "real Jews", and many today live in grinding poverty separated from the white Jewish population: Jim Crow, Israel-Style Speaking of the Sephardics, About Atheism blogger Austin Cline featured this story recently about large demonstrations (over 100,000 in Jerusalem alone) protesting a Supreme Court decision demanding school integration: "If this is how they treat fellow Jews who are simply a little bit different from them in terms of ethnic heritage and skin color, it's no wonder that they treat the Palestinians so badly. They don't seem able to like, tolerate, or just treat with a little bit of civility anyone who fails to conform to extremely narrow prejudices. How does anyone manage to conform enough to not be publicly whipped and then exiled? This is yet another in a long line of conflicts between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the state. Israeli politicians constantly bend over backwards (or forwards?) to not just accommodate the ultra-Orthodox, but even to privilege them and force other Israeli citizens to conform to ultra-Orthodox expectations. Sometimes, though, they can't bend over enough -- there's just enough independence in the judiciary, for example, to produce conflicts like this. What will the Israeli government do? Will they take steps to invalidate the Supreme Court decision and thereby help the ultra-Orthodox preserve their racist system of segregation? If so, it will be one more nail in the coffin of Israel as a secular, democratic state. The more the ultra-Orthodox win, the more theocratic, authoritarian, and illiberal Israel becomes -- and it's already doing badly. How much further does it have to go before they drop all pretense and just come out of the closet as a Jewish version of Saudi Arabia? " And finally, as for how much better gays are treated in Israel compared to Saudi Arabia....it may be not quite as bad, but Jerusalem or Tel Aviv sure as hell aren't Toronto! Gay vs. Orthodox: A Deadly Turn in Israel's Culture War? Israeli police launched a citywide manhunt through Tel Aviv for the masked, black-clad gunman who opened fire with a pistol at a gay youth club on Saturday night, Aug. 1, killing two and wounding 15 more. While the authorities have been careful not to speculate on a motive for the crime, the city's stunned gay community was not hesitant about assigning blame for the atmosphere they believe was conducive to the crime. Pointing to Orthodox Jewish gay-bashers, gay activists say the shots fired in the club for teenagers — the most serious in a series of verbal and physical attacks on their community — were a violent manifestation of Israel's ongoing culture war. The attack spotlights the tensions within Israeli society as it tries to balance Western liberalism and Orthodox Jewish values It doesn't look like they're doing much of a balancing act when the country becomes increasingly theocratic outside of the secular cosmopolitan enclave of Tel Aviv. As for this issue of whether the ban on a group calling itself "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" should have been lifted.....the downside of having them in the parade is that it will increase the politicization of the event. Previously, Gay Pride organizers have tried to steer clear of issues that would divide their community, so whether it's justified or not, the decision to include them, is going to cause division over an issue that isn't in any way related to the gay rights cause. Finally, isn't the $250,000 grant from the City of Toronto, a drop in the bucket compared to the millions in revenues brought into the city for the event? Especially after last weeks G20 fiasco, Toronto has a chance to make up for some of their losses the previous weekend. If George Mamolitti gets his way and has the grant cancelled, the money will hardly be missed by the organizers. For years they had the parade with little or no support from the City, so if the money is cut, they will still carry on without it.

Gee, one degree...that doesn't sound like a big deal! Except that when we're talking about planetary averages, five degrees will melt all land and sea ice, bringing the ocean conveyor system to a virtual standstill and kill off all living creatures in the equatorial zone. In the past, these warm spells have been closely associated with mass extinctions -- why should our age be any different? According to reputable sources: NASA and the World Meteorological Organization 2009 was the 2nd hottest year on record, and so far the first decade of the new millenium has been the warmest decade ever. They're not seeing a cooling trend, where are you getting your's from? A lot of if's there! A lot of things would have to come together and cancel out the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, and it still doesn't deal with ocean acidification and other problems besides warming that will get worse with higher CO2 levels.

It eliminates one major objection to mandatory pregnancy if the state will show concern for the "sanctity of life" even after the baby is born; but there still is that nagging problem of privacy rights. A woman who has to spend nine months pregnant, is not going to have the same choices available and freedom of movement as if she was not pregnant...not to mention the health risks. If the state feels the need to impose it's will on a private citizen, then there needs to be a reason based on protecting the general welfare of society....such as refusing abortions for the purpose of sex-selection, that can dangerously skew overall population demographics.

I don't believe that the road to this hell was paved with good intentions. Some offending priests were moved from parish to parish for years, and nothing was done about it! Many years ago, when I was living in Welland, Ontario, there was a priest who was under warrant for arrest and moved out of province to the Yukon...or somewhere off in the middle of nowhere...by the time the authorities were ready to serve him with a federal warrant and bring him back to face charges of sexual abuse of minors, the Church informed them that he had already been moved to El Salvador....long story short, nothing was done and no justice was received by anyone. All over the world the Catholic Church hierarchy got accustomed to playing this shell game of moving offending priests and even more senior clerics around whenever charges were made against them. And recently we have learned that Pope Benny himself had been involved in the damage control operation to keep priest scandals quiet. I don't think a safety-in-numbers strategy will work in this issue! Just because there are other churches and organizations involved in covering sexual abuse scandals does not provide cover for the Catholic Church. They have more opportunity for mischief than a stand-alone church that may or may not be affiliated with a larger umbrella organization. It's certainly worth asking whether rigid Church policies on celibacy and against women priests are a big part of the problem here.

NO! Because the state is taking away the choice of whether or not to bring another baby into this world. So the state has assumed the obligation of making sure that the child is cared for afterward.

The one big reason why I jumped off of the libertarian bandwagon over the last few years is because the economic ideas of the right, which emphasize individual autonomy and oppose mandatory collective strategies, are no help in dealing with this and other crises that require a global effort. Free market economics may actually work to increase economic growth, but what if growth in consumption is something that the world can no longer afford! A recent analysis of resource consumption last year, concluded that it would take three planet earths to supply the resources for our population, if everyone reached the U.S. level of consumption. We live on a finite planet, so we are coming to the end of the period where we can grow our way out of economic problems like past decades. And the fact that a real and effective strategy to stop climate change would require a worldwide cooperative effort, is one of the big reasons why there are many pessimists who say that we are already doomed. Fact is global warming is an "inconvenient truth." Even the most modest solutions got shot down at Copenhagen. Specifically, the primary agents for climate change are the high consumption first world economies, but the nations that are already being the most at risk are the impoverished regions of the third world which have only contributed fractionally to global warming, and do not have the resources to deal with the droughts, floods, rising oceans etc. that threaten their survival. A modest proposal to provide compensation to developing nations to deal with these problems and to help them improve their standards of living with renewable energy sources, was given a drop in the bucket to deal with the problems. And most of these same first world nations (including Canada) are not making any serious attempts to control their own increases in greenhouse gases! The failure of Copenhagen to provide any meaningful results leads many to pessimism, including many earth scientists. For example, yesterday we got a link to science website for a story on the Pine Island Glacier that was grossly misinterpreted by the deniers....nevertheless, another story I noticed on the site had this shocking analysis from retired microbiologist Frank Fenner: Scientist Claims Human Race ‘Will Be Extinct Within 100 Years’ Gee, even James Lovelock concludes that world population will shrink to 500 million in the next century, but this guy believes that the cascade towards human extinction won't be stopped! Let's just say that the 95 year old professor emeritus of Australian National University has drawn a very pessimistic conclusion about our chances, based on his past studies of species extinction and a few human examples of populations that consumed and polluted their way to environmental destruction...such as Easter Island. I've noticed that some other earth scientists are pessimistic about our chances of dealing with global warming and other ecological challenges, but the mainstream prevailing opinion among science advocates and political allies like Al Gore, is that the movement has to stay upbeat and refrain from giving the impression that the situation may be hopeless. The simpleminded critics of Gore et al. may think they are hiding something...and it may turn out that what they are avoiding and scripting their language around, is that the problem is even more challenging than they let on publicly.

Previously, you claimed that global temperatures were cooling, not trending upward, so which is it? If they are trending upward, why did you bother making a claim that there has been a recent drop in temperature, since that would have no bearing on long term debate over whether the Earth is getting warmer? This is like an evolution/creation debate because creationists also don't even bother making consistent arguments. Claims are just tossed out to create confusion and inhibit any opportunity to reach a consensus of opinion on the subject. Carbon dioxide's capacity to trap solar radiation has been known for decades, and we've been aware that atmospheric CO2 levels have been increasing in recent decades. After millions of years staying under 300 ppm., CO2 levels are accelerating (even during the recent economic slowdown) and getting close to 400 ppm -- a level that hasn't been seen in 15 million years, a time when global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees hotter than today, and there were no polar ice caps. Yet somehow the don't-worry-be-happy crowd wants us to believe that staying at 400 and going even higher, will have no effects on the climate! It's an absurd claim to even begin with! It should also be noted for the benefit of the geo-engineering crowd that wants to terraform our way to stopping a rise in temperatures; that this would do nothing to stop the most damaging effect of rising CO2 levels -- more than half of the extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the world's oceans....raising the level of ocean acidification....killing off corals and other sea shelf creatures...and creating even larger anoxic dead zones in the oceans which can't support any life.

I guess if I plotted a graph of temperatures from July to February, I would also have evidence of global cooling! Even if there was evidence of a modest drop in global temperatures for two or three years, that would still not qualify as evidence that the Earth would keep cooling. A large volcanic eruption could cause a short term drop -- so could a return to a solar maximum in the sunspot cycle...which is where we will be in the next two years after a quiet period with few solar flares.

A true fascist statement if I ever heard one!

And the vast majority of real Canadians, especially Toronto residents, believe that political circle jerks like these summits should be held in an isolated location, rather than in the middle of downtown in Canada's largest city! But fascists want to use a few broken windows and abandoned police cars set on fire to justify a blanket denial of everyone's civil rights. When these fools want to get together to decide how the WTO and IMF are going to run everybody's lives, they can do it on a conference call!

So, where did you get the story from? David Icke or Climategate? Regardless, when you get your latest package of claims that deny global warming you should read the complete articles that they have linked....especially if it is actually published in a science journal. The report that the glacier had been resting on a previously undiscovered undersea ridge, does not impact one way or the other on the climate change issue! Not every high temperature, flood, hurricane or melting glacier, has been claimed to be solely due to what humans are adding to the atmosphere, and claiming that a natural cause is the primary source of the movement of the Pine Island Glacier does not disprove global warming! And the most crucial problem here is that natural causes to glacier melting provide no comfort anyway, since the results will be higher sea levels! Another reason to read the source link is to get past the narrow conclusions that the writer wants to spin from the story. A little further down that story, I find one of the lead scientists stating that they are unsure what is causing the undersea ridge to melt, but it could have a human source: Dutrieux said the ice may have started thinning because of some as yet-unknown mechanism linked to climate change, blamed mainly on mankind’s use of fossil fuels. ‘It could be a shift in the wind, due to a change in climate, that pushed more warm water under the shelf,’ he said. Dr Dutrieux said: ‘We now know that there is relatively warm water beneath this floating ice so this warm water could have been able to melt the base of the ice shelf. Yes, we unite and actually read the story you linked and discovered that once again your information sources are misrepresenting scientific research. So what else is new? This is the same pattern that creationist experts use to claim they have proof against evolution. BTW speaking of misrepresenting evidence, why don't post Phil Jones complete answer in your signature quote, instead of trying to misrepresent his opinions on the subject? B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling? No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm# Typical that fundamentalists assume that everyone else blindly accepts arguments from authority like they do, but this is not the case. Phil Jones and Michael Mann have more credence than Al Gore (another frequently mentioned name on AGW), but unlike fundamentalist religion, scientific concepts stand or fall based on the evidence, not their position in the scientific community!

And yet you think nothing of applying your moral obligations to women who are considering having an abortion! Moral obligations become legally binding when a government uses them to make laws.

And regardless of whether or not it is a lifestyle choice, all those who play the anti-abortion/mandatory childbirth card have a moral obligation to support the new offspring from the "baby factories," since they want to close off all other options!

By your analogy, the modern version of the Nazi war criminal scientists are the small number of well payed scientists who are collecting generous remunerations either directly or indirectly from the oil, gas and coal companies who want confusing propaganda distributed to the public in order to prevent any governments from changing an economic system that is tailored to continuing use of fossil fuels.

Yes, it's not skepticism when you deliberately cherry pick data that can be used to support your cause, especially when the source realizes they made a mistake, but the so called climate skeptics that seized upon an anomalous cold reading don't mention the update. I seen a video of the self-proclaimed "Lord" Monckton getting reemed in front of a U.S. Congressional panel on climate change for doing something similar -- picking an arbitrarily recent time interval to claim that global air temperatures are cooling. He could get away with playing around with graphs and statistics with a general audience, but he tried to bamboozle five climatologists on the panel, who have a greater understanding of the data than the phony lord does. Once again, the whole strategy of the global warming skeptic movement follows the same pattern of creationists who try to disprove the Theory of Evolution -- they start with a preconceived conclusion (the earth is 6000 years old or that the earth is actually cooling) and ignore a wide body of evidence against their contrarian conclusions, as they demand explanations for the few anomalies that haven't been explained yet. Nevermind that both subjects -- the planet's complex weather systems and the long,slow development of life on Earth, are complex subjects that we are gradually able to understand. What I want from the climate contrarians is an answer for why we should play Russian Roulette with the lives of future generations, all because they think they have found a few facts that don't fit the evidence for warming!

The Catholic Church has become too accustomed to making up their own rules and getting away with violating laws that would put ordinary people in jail. Why should a priest be allowed to be escape justice by being moved to a new diocese, while the higher ups got away with playing this shell game for decades. Out here in the real world, we believe that forgiveness, if it comes from anywhere, should be from the person who was offended or violated....not from imaginary friends who forgive the offenses of clerics and politicians, and give them the false belief that they have a brand new fresh start, without even having to address the victim! It's also worth noting that those counseling sessions, such as the ones given to Irish paedophile priests, were in direct violation of Church canon law, which demands defrocking for such offenses: Therapy led to soaring abuse rate in Irish Church Belgium, like many other nations, has a Catholic Church hierarchy that has spent years ignoring the reports of offending priests, and even has a bishop who is also a child-molester himself. So why shouldn't the authorities ignore the Church's sense of entitlement to withhold information, that other institutions are not privy to? http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/belgium-anti-pedophile-priest-rips-silence-and-omissions-bishops

And it doesn't bother you that we were lied to when Mulroney and Reagan started this "intertwining," or that successive governments that have promised to "untwine" globalization do absolutely nothing to stop an economic system that was created for the benefit of the world's largest corporations? And you believe that budget-cutting will actually reduce deficits? And that the G8 and G20 economies will benefit from this? Ever hear of The Great Depression? The budget cutting attempts to balance budgets played a big role in keeping the Depression going for ten years. What makes me even more pissed off than the Harper Government pissing away a billion dollars to host this circle jerk, is the unfortunate reality that a peaceful protest against globalization, poverty, destruction of the environment, or the many causes that are considered "left wing" will go completely unnoticed in the mainstream ad-revenue-dependent press. And here's exhibit A: The United States Social Forum hosted a conference in Detroit this past week which drew more than 15,000 community organizers and progressive activists; and the only media commentary comes from Huffington Post, Alternet, Progressive Magazine and a few other leftist sites. The Detroit News only had a small blurb in their Community Events section with a link to the website. A search through their website shows no news coverage of the 5 day event by Detroit's largest newspaper. Does that make any sense in a city that is in such desperate economic straits? Compare that to the unwarranted news coverage given to Tea Party events, where a few hundred shit-kickers and gun nuts get get bussed in to watch their Queen Bee imbecile - Sarah Palin give another canned pep rally speech.

The greatest myth of modern politics is that conservatives are fiscally responsible. Past experience in Canada and the U.S. indicates that conservatives' long term strategy is to ruin the effectiveness of government, so that there is no public watchdog that their corporate friends and benefactors will have to answer to. They fill government departments with unqualified political hacks and cronies, and defund government by cutting tax revenues. Then conservative mantras like "government governs best which governs least" and "government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem" become self-fulfilling prophecies! Unfortunately by the time most people realize that unbridled greed and risk-taking has gone too far...such as when we discover that giant multinational oil companies did not bother to evaluate the risks of drilling deeper into the sea floor for the last remaining pockets of oil, we also discover that the government has been so weakened and compromised by big corporations, that it cannot fulfill its duty to look after the interests of the general public.

What dubious source? That New York Times article I linked used NOAA`s National Climatic Data Center for source material. As for what you put down, it appears that most of the increase in temperatures has occurred since 1950. And those graphs are just measuring air temperatures, which do not give the complete picture of how much warming is occurring, since heat is also absorbed by the world`s oceans. The heat content from land and ice sheets also needs to be factored in. When its all added together, there has been a steep rise in the planet`s total heat content http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?a=105 And that`s why it`s a misleading, dishonest claim to say that the Earth is cooling, even if you do have carefully selected air temperature data that gives such an appearance. But, since most of us aren't statisticians, and don`t have expert knowledge of the data that is selected for these charts, the arguments that I find most compelling are the big picture facts that can`t be ignored or explained away...such as why are atmospheric CO2 levels continuing to rise? And why is the rate of increase in CO2 levels accelerating? Why do so called climate change skeptics insist that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has no connection with global temperatures, when we've known for decades that CO2 traps heat? And even if it was somehow true that carbon dioxide levels can rise indefinitely without increasing temperatures, there's still that problem of ocean acidification that increases with rising CO2 levels, regardless of temperature!

Well, get on with your rethinking then! If any law is a benefit to society, it should lead to improved outcomes. We are going through this right now with drug laws and a lot of other attempts to banish vices by making them illegal. When drug prohibition leads to jails filled with drug addicts, billions in profits for organized crime, and increasingly expensive and intrusive police enforcement....then, even a lot of us on the sidelines start "rethinking." As for abortion...it already existed as a blackmarket business before abortion was decriminalized. Why should we go back in time and do it all over again? Before you start legally regulating something, you better make sure that the actual results of regulation are an improvement, or to the detriment of society.

Thanks, but I think the similarities are too obvious to ignore since both the creationists and the climate skeptics play a shell game of shifting claims and arguments. They spend all of their time attacking the conventional wisdom, and little or no time informing the public about what they themselves believe. And, when they get around to their own claims, they have dozens of variations to make it more difficult to respond to them. If someone claims to be a climate skeptic, first you have to play 20 questions to find out what they are skeptical about! Some don't even deny the evidence that we are terraforming the planet, but just want to argue for keeping the status quo by claiming that a hotter, more turbulent world is something we cannot stop, but just have to adapt to.

Notice that your National Post blogger doesn't directly challenge the numbers used to determine the merit of each expert; the objections are that one of the analysts - James Prall, is not an expert on climate change. Why should he have to be, since the comparisons were based on statistical analysis of how much each expert actually published that was related to climate change. And the blogger doesn't mention the qualifications of the other three men who co-signed that research paper....why not? The rest of his whining piece tries to make two arguments of the exception proves the rule: first, by discounting the connection between the number of academic citations and opinion on AGW, or the claim that Al Gore can pop up as a climate expert using the Google Scholar search term. And big f-n deal if it does! If Al Gore is the only outlier he can list by name, that hardly has any weight compared to the 1400 climate scientists who were compared for their views on the IPCC report. Now, for some reason the fact that 97 to 98% of climate scientists accept the basic conclusions of the IPCC Report, and the fact that the "skeptics" publish very little actual research means nothing to the skeptics. Funny that these are the same people who made a big hullabaloo about 31,000 scientists who signed the ludicrous statement:"there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere". But if you looked at the fine print....specifically, the number of actual climatologists who signed the statement, you would find that there were only 39 with actual expertise in the field. http://www.petitionproject.org/qualifications_of_signers.php Which was further confirmation that the "climate change skeptics" are a minority of cranks, similar to the scientists recruited by the Discovery Institute to make the case for Intelligent Design!