Now why would you quote me and insult me, have you nothing better to do?
Erm...
The trouble is, people who put their faith in the belief that climate change is not man-made are likely to generate serious adverse consequences for me. If they live their lives as if burning carbon is of little consequence, then matters will only get worse for me and my family and people all over the world.
I use the word faith very carefully, meaning belief in something for which there is no objective evidence. You may well argue that climate change is by the same measure a faith, but it isn't - it is a hypothesis, and it's important to stress that science always works in terms of hypotheses and never in absolutes. The scientists who work in this area are simply saying that they can reject the "it's not man-made" hypothesis with about 90-95% confidence. It isn't proven that it's man-made, absolutely not, but the simplest way of accounting for all the data is to postulate that it is down to us.
You can stick with the outside bet that it is not man-made, but to do so is to articulate a faith unless you personally have objective evidence - not cherry-picked articles from secondary sources - that supports that idea. I don't think you do have such evidence. I suspect that you, like many others, wish to discredit the scientists' carefully worked out conclusions because they are inconvenient and uncomfortable for your lifestyle.
So you can have your faith if you wish, but I don't like faith-based groups affecting my life negatively - I get quite enough of that in other walks of life. I prefer to trust in rationality. Dismissing a huge body of work with comments like "first it was called global warming, now it's called climate change, so it's all hooey" does not fall within what I mean by rationality.
I didn't wish to insult you, and apologise if that's how it came across. I did wish to show you that the suggestion that big science is winning a propaganda war against little oil is scarcely credible, and I used a perhaps rather too heavy-handed "through the looking glass" argument to make my point.
I guess I should declare my interest here - I am a professional scientist. I work on heart disease not climate, so have no special knowledge of climate change. However, I do know how science works. It isn't perfect, it does make mistakes, but they are usually honest mistakes. For most of us there's no point in doing it unless you go after the truth. To suggest that 1000 scientists working on this together (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are somehow being untruthful, or have been bought off, is to strain credulity beyond the limit.
