Not sure if I posted it before, but
Sullivan made a great case on how it was past time to accept the basics of man-made warming and start an honest discussion on solutions.
In it he linked a piece by
Chait dismantling the dishonest denialism of Charles Krauthammer and George Will, two men who should know better.
I had been previously gobsmacked by the ignorance of George Will's repeated denier claim that there had been no warming since 1998. When multiple scientists wrote to address it and some even contacted him directly, he simply dug in harder. This is when I figured he had just thrown clear thought and intellectualism to the winds and had become a garden variety climate change denier. After reading Chait's piece, though, I've figured out the real reason for his position, and he lays it out in great detail. (Bold mine and explained below.)
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Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don't question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don't question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what's happening.
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A moment ago, we had a report here on our crumbling infrastructure, gave it a D, emergency. Who wrote it? As we said on there, it was written by civil engineers, who said, by golly, we need more of what civil engineers do and are paid to do. Again, there is a sociology of science, there is a sociology in all of this, and engaging the politics of this, we have to understand the enormous interests now invested in climate change.
So there it is, explained in his own words. George Will denies man-made global climate change because a) he
has interests like everybody else, b) he wants money from right-wing TV, radio, and publications which are the
biggest source of cash for the kind of thing he does, c) he has
conformed to peer pressure and, d)
by golly we need more of what right-wing pundits do and are paid to do i.e. spout opinions (facts be damned) that tell the audience what they want to hear.
I should have figured out immediately that Will is too intelligent to miss the very basics of trend lines that scientists patiently described for him, the overwhelming number of papers from literally across the globe, global (not local temperature anomaly maps, shipping open for part of the year in the Arctic, etc. No, he's in it for the money. He said so himself! And I'd bet dollars to donuts that George Will makes a LOT more money than the vast majority of climate scientists. And he won't have a gig at Fox anymore if he stands up and admits what nearly every climate scientist knows and accepts.