[lutorm]

You mean I should believe a huge stream-of-consciousness ascii file over scientific papers? Sorry, that's not going to fly with me.

And your money argument doesn't work. Are you seriously saying those who argue AGW is NOT real don't have a financial interest in that?

[enko]

> Are you seriously saying those who argue AGW is NOT real don't have a financial interest in that?

Are you seriously saying that every single person who has ever questioned the establishment line on AGW has a financial interest in some kind of carbon emitting industry? Bollocks. I am not a "believer" or a "denier" but rather a skeptic, of both sides, whom I find to be very agenda-driven.

Now you might think I'm an idiot, and fair enough, but my argumentativeness is in no way whatsoever driven by financial interests. I don't think I am alone in that. Please factor that into your thinking.

[lutorm]

Please. I didn't say "every single person" any more than you did.

I'm exactly like you. Except that I happen to generally think that the vast majority of climate scientists probably are honest and know what they are doing.

But neither you nor me are pushing our opinion in the media, in congress, etc. So we're not really relevant to your argument, neither of us.

Let's think about who have financial interests, shall we:

On the "would prefer a world where fossil fuels are fine and dandy all around" side we have entities like oil and automobile companies, which just so happen to be some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world.

On the "would prefer the world be going to hell" side we have... green-tech startups? Maybe climate scientists have a slight incentive because research funding is probably easier to get if people generally think an issue is important. But that might have been true 20 years ago. Nowadays I bet you'd get as much funding really proving there's nothing to worry about, lots of politicians would like that to be true. For the oil companies, on the other hand, there's no silver lining, they need to sell less oil and that'll come right out of their bottom line.

If we now compare the amount of money in climate research grants with oil company profits, it is at least to me pretty clear which side I think has the largest financial interest.