George Rebane
I am a skeptic about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and all that is currently shoved under this all-encompassing umbrella. True believers or, more correctly, post-enquiry adherents (PEAs) of AGW do not recognize the nuanced category of skeptics and lump us all together under the label “Deniers” – it keeps things manageably simple for them. In one of the pieces that I posted on this issue, I expounded on the scientific notions of Occam’s razor and falsifiability. The latter being a requirement of any proposition accepted as science. If there is no way that what you propose can be shown to be false, then your proposition is not one of science but of faith/religion.
My friend James Currier, a smart and serious thinker, posted a comment to my piece in which he challenged me to defend my stance as a skeptic by presenting arguments in a manner that would allow my position to be falsified. If the arguments upon which a person bases his skepticism can be shown to be false, then his position as a skeptic would be unreasonable, and, presumably, such a person of good will would seek another more defendable position even, perhaps, becoming an AGW proponent. I have accepted my friend’s challenge and invite the reader to download the short paper ‘Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’.
In this paper I bend over backwards to not use equations or complex diagrams so as to make it accessible to the broadest audience of intelligent readers. Nevertheless, the issue of AGW is very complex and the paper will probably not be as broadly accessible as I had hoped. For that all I can do is apologize, and leave it as an admitted weakness that I was not able to overcome.


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