Ah yes, the tired old you are irrelevant because are funded by big (coal, gas, oil, wood, propane, butane, electric, peat, Exxon-Mobil take your pick) gets turned into a peer reviewed paper. What will they think of next?
Ironically, this is published in the Journal of Business Ethics and is titled:
Astroturfing Global Warming: It Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence
Charles H. Cho, Martin L. Martens, Hakkyun Kim and Michelle Rodrigue
Abstract
Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them. They constitute the corporate version of grassroots social movements. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline this astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by undertaking a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this particular issue and examines the effectiveness of astroturf organizations in the global warming context, wherein large corporate polluters have an incentive to set up astroturf organizations to undermine the importance of human activities in climate change. We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations have an impact on the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used grassroots websites. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in promoting business interests over environmental protection. In addition to the multiple business ethics issues it raises, astroturfing poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement.
Kid blogger Chris Mooney over at the Intersection Blog of Discover Magazine writes about it and says:
The website for each condition, respectively, consisted of a ‘‘Home page’’ with links to five other pages pertaining to global warming and the organization’s activities. In the grassroots condition, these were labeled as ‘‘About us,’’ ‘‘Key issues and solutions,’’ ‘‘Why act now?’’ ‘‘Get involved!’’ and ‘‘Contact us.’’ Similarly, in the astroturf condition, the pages links were labeled as ‘‘About us,’’ ‘‘Myths/facts,’’ ‘‘Climate science,’’ ‘‘Scientific references,’’ and ‘‘Contact us.’’ All of the content was based on information found on real-world grassroots and astroturf web-sites ….
A further manipulation consisted of disclosing information regarding the funding source that supported the organization. The organization’s name in all websites, regardless of the condition, was ‘‘Climate Clarity.’’ In each of the funding source conditions, all web pages within the condition specified who funds the organization (donations, Exxon Mobil or the Conservation Heritage Fund). The ‘‘no disclosure’’ condition did not have any information on funding sources anywhere within the web pages.
So, they setup fake websites to gather fake data. Nice. Not only that, they “borrowed” content from other websites to use on these “fake” websites, apparently without citation or attribution, lest that taint the results. Sounds like a job for John Mashey and “Deep Climate” aka Dave Clarke. I’m sure they’ll get right on the case like they did with Wegman.
So, this study seems perfect for a business ethics journal. Glad to see that the study of opposite views fits in to this trend recently published by Security Week.
Cybercriminals Creating 57,000 Fake Web Sites Every Week
I was going to do an analysis of the paper, but commenter Nullius in Verba did such a good job already I’ll just repost his comment from the Discover blog.
Nullius in Verba Says:
Mmm. So we have one website with “fluffy” headings like “why act now” and “get involved”, and another site with evidence-related headings like “climate science” and “scientific references”, and people were more persuaded by the one with the science. Why might that be, do you think?
I’m not quite sure what characteristic of astroturf sites this is supposed to be testing. If the only difference is whether funding sources were disclosed, it would indeed test the extent to which people were influenced by ad hominem considerations. But there also appear to be material differences in the content? Is the claim supposed to be that astroturf sites are more likely to use headings like “climate science”? This study does not, on the face of it, make any sense.
I’ve got an uneasy feeling that the difference was that “grassroots” was simply used to label pro-AGW and “astroturf” to label anti-AGW, and what this study is really showing is that giving them information on scepticism made people more doubtful of AGW. The “astroturf”/”grassroots” labelling would then be entirely misleading – propaganda dressed up as science in other words. There are of course many genuinely grassroots sceptical sources, and several prominent pro-AGW astroturf sites.
It would therefore be helpful to make it clearer what the distinction between “grassroots” and “astroturf” being tested actually was, and how it follows from the different types of authors. Because if they really did just label all sceptics as “astroturf”, this is even worse than the usual fare. I’m hoping it’s not true, and I’ve just misread the description. Did they in fact have both pro- and anti-AGW in both categories?
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Curt says:
July 11, 2011 at 8:27 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all. Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual.
————————
BREAKTHROUGH!!!
You have just made the ultimate skeptic’s point. If it is so difficult to tease out the anthropogenic effect, it cannot be possibly be (practically) significant. (And as my statistics professors drummed into my head, there is a big difference between statistical significance and practical significance.)
That is, even if there is a real physical anthropogenic effect (which few here would deny) and it is large enough to separate out from natural variations, if it takes such sophisticated techniques to tease out from natural variation, it is practically insignificant compared to the natural variation.
_______
Anthropogenic warming may have been insignificant compared to the forcings from Milankovitch cycles, solar effects, volcanoes, etc. 10,000 years ago or even in 1850, or 1900, or even 1950, but it is a moving a target in the sense that CO2 levels continue to increase at a record pace…far faster than anything seen on this planet in at least 1,000,000 years. At some point, the levels of CO2 will begin to dominate over all the other forcings. It is the determination as to whether this point has been reached or not, that takes the training and expertise that is beyond the capacity of the average person to make. But this in no way makes it insignificant, for once the effects truly are detected, if CO2 is the culprit, those effects will be with us for many centuries unless sequestration is undertaken. It could be likened to the expertise it might take listening for a train approaching by putting your ear to a railroad track. The real experts can tell you at some point that a signal has been found and a train is approaching, and even if that signal is small compared to the other noises around the track where you’re listening, eventually the train is roaring by and it is anything but insignificant. The warmist part of me is 75% convinced that the experts looking for the anthropogenic signal are right, and they’ve found that warming train is coming. The 25% skeptical part of me says, well, maybe they just don’t know all the other forcings that may be coming from the sun, or longer term THC, GCR’s etc, hence why I really am looking forward to seeing more results from the CLOUD experiment, as I sure many on this blog are as well. Still, if I had to vote today, I side with those who are saying there is a train approaching, and is drivin by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
In sum, my educated, but non-professional opinion is that the anthropogenic signal began to dominate the overall other forcings sometime later in the 20th century, and that prior to that, Milankovitch dominated on the longer term, with solar in the middle range, and things like volcanoes and ENSO dominating on the shorter end of the spectrum. Hence, even experts (though some my quibble with this term applied here) like Michael Mann have said that there seems to be a solar fingerprint on the “LIttle Ice Age”, but during that period, there was no anthropogenic forcing of any size. A lot has happened in the atmosphere since then, and it seems we may get a chance to see how a new Maunder Minimum will effect climate when CO2 levels are 40% higher than they were last time the sun took a nap.
Just one final thougt about those experts trained to look for the anthropogenic signal in the climate. The experts have long said that we’d see the biggest and earliest effects of AGW in the Arctic. This has been clearly stated for many decades. Now the fact that we are indeed seeing these changes come about COULD be just coincidence, but the probability that it is, is far less than the probability the multiple global climate models have shown many decades ago that this would occur. This has always been one the biggest reasons that I remain a “warmist”, as the changes in the Arctic currently have no other explanation or natural forcing. It is far beyond natural variability, despite the submarines coming up in open water decades ago that are so popular with some uniformed skeptics (who I liken to the astroturf websites). The Arctic is changing rapidly, far beyond a random walk, and far beyond natural variability, and the currently only forcing that can be modeled to display what we are seeing is the effects of CO2. This makes some skeptics crazy, because I feel their skepticism has become a religion to them, and in this way, are no different than the rabid CAGW crowd in that they will accpet nothing that will create cognitive dissonence, and won’t even consider the possibility that the melting Arctic could be anthropogenic in origin.
Curt.
Absolutely…I think old Gatesey shot himself in the foot again.
Up until quite recently the evidence was meant to have been so OVERWHELMING and so many SCIENTISTS were right behind it that only denialist flat earthers like us could question it!!!
Now it turns out only a chosen few very special people can understand or even SEE it.
So it’s gone from….
Global Warming Aaaarrghh…it’s a CATASTROPHE and it’s happening NOW.
to…
Global Warming Oh…hard to tell if it’s happening at all!
It’s so useful to have an RGATES on this site, he/she embodies in one person all the righteous superiority of the Warmist. The dizzying shifts of position, the constant reversals of the laws of cause and effect, the shameless ‘revision’ of previously held articles of faith (see above).
Know thy opponent…thanks RGates, keep up the good work!
GP asks “Does “conducting a study” make one a scientist?”
If the study is genuinely aimed at gaining knowledge, yes. If it is to push a political position, no. I suspect that R Gates would not include Erasto B Mpemba in any list of people “really qualified to look at” any kind of data. Although at the time (http://www.thecolourblue.co.uk/mpemba.shtml) Mpemba was only a 14-year-old Tanzanian schoolboy making ice-cream, he was indeed a scientist. I have heard rumours that Dr Osborne’s lab-assistant (“I’ll keep on repeating the experiment until we get the right result“) is now a climate scientist.
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all.
Please name 10. Personally I don’t think I’ve come across even one.
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 9:09 pm
In sum, my educated, but non-professional opinion is that the anthropogenic signal began to dominate the overall other forcings sometime later in the 20th century, and that prior to that, Milankovitch dominated on the longer term, with solar in the middle range, and things like volcanoes and ENSO dominating on the shorter end of the spectrum.
Since you do read posts in this blog, did you spend some thought on J.Storr-Hall’s simple data presentation a few posts ago? Particularly the plot that one could ask a highschool student to extract from the ice core data disproves your statement . Our curve, red dots, is right on the average rise of the last five, black dots, Holocene bumps and troughs. Nothing exceptional at all. Seventy years ago we diverged more from the average than we do now. If you also pay some attention to the plot you will see that it is also forecasting the future on average, from data which tells us that even if we are still on the rise, like the lowest blue or the second highest one of the curves in the five-average, the rise will be less then 1C per century, because the total rise in temperature in our region of the holocene is bounded by 1C.
This is a simple and clarifying plot and it is worth spending some time looking at it, of course if one can read plots.
Dave Wendt says:
July 11, 2011 at 9:41 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all.
Please name 10. Personally I don’t think I’ve come across even one.
=====================
……. and while you’re at it R. Gates, could you also post up just a rudimentary mathematical treatment of the data that you got from those great heroes of yours that led you to your conclusion.
R Gates;
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all.>>>
You’re probably right. Well sorta. You see, finding any sort of a semblance of an AGW “signal” in the data is truly difficult, perhaps impossible, for the simple reason that it is teeny tiny almost zero in comparison to natural variation.
Now, let’s ask a different question. How many people are there in the world who know what “logarithmic” means and can explain why the logarithmic nature of CO2 requires that any additional increases to CO2 become increasingly insignificant?
I don’t know that number. How many people graduate from degree programs in physics, math, engineering, geology and so on per year? Millions?
It is only when one sets the physics aside and peer instead into data on polar bear populations, fragmented temperature records, tidal gauges with no reference points, hurricane frequency and so on that there’s any evidence to speak of, and one can barely measure it. Just as the physics predicts….
What did they consider to be grassroots websites? Sites agreeing with the CAGW fallacy?
What was their null hypothesis?
Or is this a post normal research paper where you collect only data that confirms your prejudices?
We have one certain astroturf site in Australia. It is Getup. It is funded by George Soros and WWF and the unions. It only gives pro CAGW opinions. It says it has 400,000 members when in fact paid subscribers are around the 17,000 mark. I censors any opinion that does not support CAGW and other far left comments.
You can tell anyone who comes from that site because they repeat the same opinions down to almost the same words. I would include comma’s but they do not know how to use them.
davidmhoffer says:
July 11, 2011 at 10:18 pm
“How many people are there in the world who know what “logarithmic” means and can explain why the logarithmic nature of CO2 requires that any additional increases to CO2 become increasingly insignificant?”
_____
David, this is the kind of thinking about the climate that creates confusion, and I’m sort of amazed that someone of your intelligence would propagate it. It is true that the basic greenhouse properties of CO2 can be plotted on a logarithmic scale, but this is not so say that the effects of additional CO2 into the atmosphere will have a sum of effects that are logarithmic. Far from it. We know that the climate “jumps” to new states rather rapidly, as any system under deterministic chaos will do. So how many intelligent people really understand even the basics of deterministic chaos? The first confusion is to get beyond the notion that chaos means randomness, and the second notion is to understand that chaotic systems, while unpredictable in specifics, can be very predictable in terms of trends. We know that the climate will jump to a new state with the continually addition of forcing agents over time (think of the small year-to-year changes in Milankovitch cycles, or the small changes in solar output over a few solar cycles, or the small addition of a greenhouse gas each year). Many of these things have effects that can proceed logarithmically, and just like forces between grains of sand in sandpile that build up logarithmically, so to, the forcing agents on the climate do as well, and yet, at some point the climate shifts, the sandpile has a small landslide of sorts, and things change rapidly, as is the nature of system acting under deterministic chaos. The nature of these shifts, have to do with the sum of all the related parts that act through various inter-related feedback processes that eventually reach a tipping point where the system shifts.
In short, it is wrong to simply speak about the logarithmic effects of CO2 as the total effect that CO2 will have on the climate. Just look at positive feedback processes going on in the Arctic to see how things can progress in a very non-linear, non-logarithmic way. So if you really believe this, then I suggest you pick up a few books about deterministic chaos and maybe even review some of the research being done into the nature of sandpiles. The climate has tipping points, and they are normally reached by small changes occurring over long periods of time. The only exceptions are rapid changes like volcanoes, but these are like someone bumping the table the sandpile is being built on. The build up of anthropogenic CO2 may be somewhere in between, as it is accumulating over centuries, but is actually building up rapidly in geological terms, but we don’t fully know yet how sensitive the climate is, nor of course, where the potential tipping points are.
Dave Wendt says:
July 11, 2011 at 9:41 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all.
Please name 10. Personally I don’t think I’ve come across even one.
____
Please tell that to Dr. Julienne Stroeve the next time she comes here. She is someone who has dedicated her career to studying the Arctic, and probably knows more about sea ice and Arctic responses to climate than anyone else who frequents this site. If she says the changes going on in the Arctic are showing a non-linear response to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing…sorry, I’ve got to give her a great deal of credibility. She would be one of those “thousands” of experts that I feel are qualified, I mean really qualified, to give an assessment of what’s going on with the climate, and especially as an expert in region of the planet that has long been identified as being on the front lines of climate change.
Deterministic Chaos…hmnn
Sounds like the structure of the warmist argument.
We’re determined to sound convincing but our thought processes are chaotic.
Well I suppose they would be, what, with all that radiative Forcing, tipping points, and climate JUMPS?!!!!….it’s bound to be a bit confusing, especially when you factor in that “we don’t fully know yet how sensitive the climate is”…..(enter burly men in white coats who lead RGates sobbing from the room)
R Gates;
David, this is the kind of thinking about the climate that creates confusion, and I’m sort of amazed that someone of your intelligence would propagate it. It is true that the basic greenhouse properties of CO2 can be plotted on a logarithmic scale, but this is not so say that the effects of additional CO2 into the atmosphere will have a sum of effects that are logarithmic.>>>
Nice diatribe of falsifiable circular logic presented in a semi logical progressive strategy fully engaged with spurious terminology directed at obvious conclusivity devoid of constructs requiring definitive measure by which….
I can babble on for a few more paragraphs too. Throwing around terminology is easy. Do you even know what “deterministic chaos” means? There’s not one sentence in your ridiculous answer that has any meaning in the real world, save one.
You are right, we don’t know what the sensitivity is. But here’s the truth:
If the sensitivity is very high, then we’d have seen dramatic changes already. Instead we see arguments about which year was the hottest…by one one hundredth of a degree.
And if sensitivity is low…then we don’t give a sh*t.
And you can dress up your tipping point bullarky along with your feedback bullarky with as many multi syllable words as you want, the fact remains that CO2 is logarithmic. What ever effect the last +100 ppm has had, FEEDBACKS INCLUDED, the next +100 ppm will have half that effect. FEEDBACKS INCLUDED.
Which you da*n well know yet you keep spouting off about sand piles and deterministic chaos and tipping points as if they mean anything, and as if you have any idea what they mean. You are a fraud and an excellent example of just what is wrong with this entire debate. When confronted with the facts, you spout meaningless drivel one paragraph after another, and each one pretty much a cut and paste from another thread where you were made to look equally foolish by spouting the same drivel.
At least come up with something new.
I’m confused. Astroturf doesn’t have grassroots.
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 11:56 pm
Dave Wendt says:
July 11, 2011 at 9:41 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all.
Please name 10. Personally I don’t think I’ve come across even one.
____
Please tell that to Dr. Julienne Stroeve the next time she comes here. She is someone who has dedicated her career to studying the Arctic, and probably knows more about sea ice and Arctic responses to climate than anyone else who frequents this site. If she says the changes going on in the Arctic are showing a non-linear response to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing…sorry, I’ve got to give her a great deal of credibility.
Is this who you are referring to? You may be right, in that blouse she could probably convince me of a lot of things. I guess we’ll call that one.
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:10 pm
“Seems to me I’ve seen a few “astroturf” books out there on the subject of climate as well…”
________________________________________________________________________
R Gates, nice MEANINGLESS drive by hit. Just like the study, you have named exact;y none of them. So MAN UP Gates, tell us which books on climate are astroturf hit peices, and who funded them.
As far as the “few thousand” that understand climate, again that is ignorance, and all few thousand who claim to “know” are arrogant indeed. Simply put, many are skeptics because they understand that we know so little about many aspects of climate, that we cannot say anything with certainty, but the observations are disproving yur CAGW theory.
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 11:56 pm
Please tell that to Dr. Julienne Stroeve the next time she comes here. She is someone who has dedicated her career to studying the Arctic, and probably knows more about sea ice and Arctic responses to climate than anyone else who frequents this site. If she says the changes going on in the Arctic are showing a non-linear response to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing…sorry, I’ve got to give her a great deal of credibility.
Here’s your hero, describing how she became a true Believer, from an interview in 2009:
“Stroeve: I think when I first started out studying sea ice, or even just climate in general in the Arctic, I didn’t really think that we were in the midst of this global warming phenomena yet. But then, these last few years when we just continued to see these record ice losses, I started to change my way of thinking and realize that we are having a huge impact on our climate and we’re actually causing the ice cover to pretty much disappear now. And, yeah, it’s been alarming. Because we don’t really fully understand the implications of this, and I think that’s the biggest fear, is that we really don’t know what we are doing. It’s like we are playing with the dials on our climate and we don’t really know the outcome of it yet.”
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2125
Sorry, no credibility there. She just made a huge leap from science to faith, just like you do. Peas in a pod.
Funny thing is. The vast majority of astroturf operations have been run by leftists and environmentalists.
These guys define themselves as genuine, and everyone else as astroturf by reflex.
A few spots above this one, is an article about a group that is organizing to oppose the expansion of an existing pipeline. It is almost entirely funded by one or two left wing environmental groups.
Now that is actual astroturfing.
R. Gates says: July 11, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Just one final thougt about those experts trained to look for the anthropogenic signal in the climate. The experts have long said that we’d see the biggest and earliest effects of AGW in the Arctic. This has been clearly stated for many decades. Now the fact that we are indeed seeing these changes come about COULD be just coincidence, but the probability that it is, is far less than the probability the multiple global climate models have shown many decades ago that this would occur. This has always been one the biggest reasons that I remain a “warmist”, as the changes in the Arctic currently have no other explanation or natural forcing. It is far beyond natural variability, despite the submarines coming up in open water decades ago that are so popular with some uniformed skeptics (who I liken to the astroturf websites). The Arctic is changing rapidly, far beyond a random walk, and far beyond natural variability, and the currently only forcing that can be modeled to display what we are seeing is the effects of CO2.
What about the imnpact of wind on the Arctic, i.e.;
“Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down to the region’s swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a new study reveals.” including in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/22/wind-sea-ice-loss-arctic
This 2011 paper submitted to The Cryosphere L. H. Smedsrud, et al.;
http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/5/1311/2011/tcd-5-1311-2011-print.pdf
used “geostrophic winds derived from reanalysis data to calculate the Fram Strait ice area export back to 1957, finding that the sea ice area export recently is about 25 % larger than during the 1960’s.”
Additionally this paper;
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442%282001%29014%3C3508%3AFSIFAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2
found that;
“Observations reveal a strong correlation between the ice fluxes through the Fram Strait and the cross-strait air pressure difference.”
“Although the 1950s and 1990s stand out as the two decades with maximum flux variability, significant variations seem more to be the rule than the exception over the whole period considered.”
“A noticeable fall in the winter air pressure of 7 hPa is observed in the Fram Strait and the Barents Sea during the last five decades.”
“The corresponding decadal maximum change in the Arctic Ocean ice thickness is of the order of 0.8 m. These temporal wind-induced variations may help explain observed changes in portions of the Arctic Ocean ice cover over the last decades. Due to an increasing rate in the ice drainage through the Fram Strait during the 1990s, this decade is characterized by a state of decreasing ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean.”
David says:
July 12, 2011 at 2:24 am
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:10 pm
“Seems to me I’ve seen a few “astroturf” books out there on the subject of climate as well…”
________________________________________________________________________
R Gates, nice MEANINGLESS drive by hit. Just like the study, you have named exact;y none of them. So MAN UP Gates, tell us which books on climate are astroturf hit peices, and who funded them.
___
You should probably read this study, which shows that in excess 90% of “skeptical” books have linkages to Conservative Think Tanks (CTT’s):
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644010802055576
As a fiscal conservative, I sort of resent the term used in this context, but those are the facts. But in this regard, it is not surprising the groups like the Heartland Institute were on the wrong side, IMO, in both the cigarette issue as well as the CFC/Ozone issue.
as Gates says “Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly
educatedindoctrinated individual.”There, fixed it for you.
R. Gates says:
July 12, 2011 at 6:33 am
“As a fiscal conservative, I sort of resent the term used in this context, but those are the facts. But in this regard, it is not surprising the groups like the Heartland Institute were on the wrong side, IMO, in both the cigarette issue as well as the CFC/Ozone issue.”
Oh. The Ozone hole’s finally gone? That’s good.
R Gates;
You should probably read this study, which shows that in excess 90% of “skeptical” books have linkages to Conservative Think Tanks (CTT’s)>>>
In the abstract, the very first sentence defines skeptics as people who deny the seriousness of the problem. Then it goes on to tall about environmentalism, and the “study”, which pre-supposes that the skeptics are wrong at best and just outright liwers lining their own pockets at worst, isn’t even about climate change, it is about environmentalism in general. I didn’t bother reading further. This is a typical “since we’re right and they’re wrong, we should study them to figure out what is the matter with them. Are they stupid? On the take? What?”
The notion that the skeptics might be right just never crossed their mind, and as for the notion that 92% of the books have links to conservative think tanks, I wonder how it is that I’ve read so many books, papers, articles and so on and never stumbled across even one.
Further, you totaly side stepped the logarithmic argument…yet again…you always do…because you don’t have an answeer, and so you change the subject.
@ur momisugly David – you wrote “In the abstract, the very first sentence defines skeptics as people who deny the seriousness of the problem.”
No it doesn’t, it says
“Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them.”