[Hasknewbie]

It's interesting to note that he's being attacked in part because republicans are relying on him. Of course they don't do this because of any sort of scientific integrity on their part, but only because they happen to agree with him on some specific points. And of course the democrats do not point that hypocrisy out since they're doing the same thing.

He's also only addressing his area of expertise, extreme weather events and their cost, not the overall risks triggered by climate change (such as ecosystems collapse, or triggering additional release of greenhouse gas via thawing). That is, at no point is he denying other areas of this (large) topic.

And yet this is sufficient to get lies (including in this thread) about him being a climate change denier, which clearly he's not, or that he's "against the consensus scientific view". He's against the consensus political view. His work is based on the IPCC. The IPCC has its problems, but it is an international body that's pretty mainstream and recognized as such by many countries. The IPCC assess the validity and importance of papers published around the world, their reports are the opposite of fringe.

To me an important point is that this is just one more example of the supremacy of dogma over facts in US public discourse, and that it impacts both the left and the right. For us non-American it is (I assume) pretty easy to spot crazy republicans and their agenda: they're usually quite shameless about it and not very subtle. And so we are somewhat immune to their ideas. What I'm growing increasingly concerned with is that we tend to consider the democrats as the comparatively "reasonable party", the ones that accept facts and science, the ones that are more humanistic. I don't think they are, I think they're just a hell of a lot more insidious about it.

[someguydave]

As a US right-winger I believe that climate change is pushed by the democrats because it provides the justification for unlimited and centralized government intervention in people’s lives, which is what they wanted anyway because of ideological reasons. The actual impact of climate change is therefore irrelevant and possibly detrimental to this agenda. It’s also my opinion that foreigners are unlikely to get an unbiased view of the right in America unless they go digging for it specifically.