Posted on 5 April 2012 by dana1981

This post is a brief explanation for those who label themselves climate "skeptics" as to what skepticism really is.

Anthony Watts and I both attended Christopher Monckton's recent talk in Sacramento, California.  In that talk, Monckton made some wild assertions that the state's proposed carbon cap and trade system will cost $450 billion over the next 8 years - approximately one-quarter of the Gross State Product (the state equivalent of Gross Domestic Product).  After the presentation I researched the source of Monckton's economic arguments, and found it was entirely based on one heavily-flawed and debunked paper, and Monckton had neglected to even mention the rebuttals or other studies on the costs of the cap and trade system (which found it would have an insignificant impact on Gross State Product or any other economic measure).

After emailing this information to Monckton, I put together a blog post and offered it to Anthony Watts, who claims to be a climate "skeptic," and who had published Monckton's faulty presentation in his blog WUWT.  Watts said he would consider publishing the post, and would certainly publish it in exchange for a post on Skeptical Science denouncing the use of the term "denier," explaining that he considers the term highly offensive and considers himself a true skeptic.

We did not agree to this exchange because Skeptical Science is a science website, not a rhetoric website.  For the record, we do not use the term "denier" in our posts (primarily because objections to the term serve as a distraction to the scientific content of our posts), but we generally do not view it as offensive.  A "denier" is simply a person who denies some aspect of reality, facts, and/or science.

Ultimately Watts declined to publish my post, which is certainly his perrogative.  Unfortunately, he did publish another post in which Monckton doubled-down on his absurd economic alarmist nonsense, claiming that his trumped-up $450 billion figure was an underestimate because he multiplied his source estimate by an arbitrary factor of 2.5 instead of an arbitrary factor of 10.  Arbitrary multiplications aside, Monckton's follow-up post entirely failed to address the underlying problem that the source on which he relied had no basis in reality.  

Monckton's latest WUWT post is the equivalent of robbing a bank and running a red light in the getaway car, then telling the police you didn't do anything wrong because you didn't break the speed limit!

This is not skepticism.  Skepticism involves considering all evidence equally.  Ignoring the many pieces of inconvenient evidence and doubling-down on those few pieces of evidence which seem to confirm what we want to believe is not skepticism.  If those on WUWT wish to be considered skeptics, they need to first learn what skepticism is.