tarquin wrote:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
(3) In a number of cases, Ed has inserted claims that are clearly false and misleading, such as his statement awhile back that "Environmentalists and atmospheric scientists are at odds over the global warming hypothesis." This statement (which has since been removed in the usual self-correcting wiki way) deceptively suggested that the debate over global warming is between "environmentalists" vs. "scientists," when in fact the debate is between "proponents of the global warming hypothesis" (a group that includes most environmentalists and most atmospheric scientists) vs. "global warming skeptics" (a group that includes mostly non-scientists such as Ed himself).
it seems to me that most global warming skeptics are from the US. For example, all the major political parties in the UK support Kyoto.
This is getting off-topic, but one should be careful not to automatically link treaties like the Kyoto protocol and the scientific debate over global warming. The consensus that global warming occurs is fairly strong, but the consensus that the Kyoto protocol is the right thing to do about it is significantly less strong--that is, there are people who think global warming exists who nonetheless think that the Kyoto protocol is not the right way to fix it. This is, notably, the official US position on the issue ("we need to do something about global warming, but this isn't that something"), mostly due to concerns that Kyoto gives developing countries a free ride, and so just encourages moving polluting factories out of 1st-world countries, resulting in no net benefit to the global ecosystem.
(Note that I'm ambivalent on the issue myself, just noting that this distinction does exist. Perhaps Bush is a bad example to pick since you may or may not believe the sincerity of his views on this issue, but there are more legitimate scientists who hold similar viewpoints.)
-Mark