Global Warming Denialists Turning on Themselves as Their Climate Change Titanic Sinks

I did a post a while back about a "Climate Skeptics Conference" held in New York City. According to Andrew Revkin, writing in the Scotland in Sunday newspaper, it may just have been a last hurrah for the global warming denialist industry.

Case against climate change melting away

For example, from the linked article:

"But large corporations such as Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 (£414,000) to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support "to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner"."

And:

"But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, said that the experts giving talks were "a shrinking collection of extremists" and that they were "left talking to themselves"."

And this long piece from the article above:

"But Lindzen also criticised widely publicised assertions by other sceptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, was erroneous, he said.

Speaking of the sun's slight variability, he said: "Acting as though this is the alternative (to blaming greenhouse gases] is asking for trouble."

S Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, said: "As a physicist, I am concerned that some sceptics, a very few, are ignoring the physical basis.

"There is one who denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which goes against actual data," Singer said, adding that other sceptics wrongly contend that "humans are not responsible for the measured increase in atmospheric CO2."

There were notable absences from the conference this year. Russell Seitz, a physicist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivered a speech at last year's meeting. But Seitz, who has lambasted environmental campaigners for distorting climate science, now warns that the sceptics are in danger of doing the same thing.

The most strident advocates on either side of the global warming debate, he said, are "equally oblivious to the data they seek to discount or dramatise".

John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for "guilt by association"."

As we have seen, many of the global warming denialists have been pushing the very "party line" that their lauded "shills and charlatans" (plus, of course, the real scientists with real concerns) are now criticizing as very misguided ideologically based opinions.

Keep in mind, this was at the "Skeptics Conference" and these are the words of the "skeptics" themselves. Apparently skeptics are beginning their "every man for himself" race to the lifeboats as their Titanic sinks (perhaps after hitting a melting iceberg).