I contend that most so called Climate Change “Skeptics” are not in fact skeptical of their own knowledge. Many are basically propagating, usually regurgitating, already dis-proven arguments normally created from a position of ignorance.
These people stalk the environmental debates online and persist in misleading people with poor claims, sowing doubt and causing people to waste there time. Unlike in the real world of society, we don’t have the opportunity to take them to account, question there reputation and disempower them in there anti-social practices. They just turn up on another blog or in another letter to the editor time and time again, with little chance they will ever have to make account of their often absurd claims.
Can we do anything about it ?
One idea is to build a website that lists and when possible tracks the activities of there people and there pseudonyms this has the following benefits;
- Provide a resource to use against them when you fall upon their bad behavior
- Alert you to there bias and possible vested interests
- Provide matching search strings so others searching for them stumble upon “the registry” and get to see the activity of listed skeptics.
- Provide links to and advice on locating rebuttals to their claims.
- Record their claims and statements so they can be used against them at a future time and place – thus imparting some consequences for there claims.
This site would not aim to replace strong skeptic and denier rebuttal sites but to support them in their good work.
Some features of the site;
- Gradual documentation of both skeptical and rebuttal sites
- Moderated crowd sourced site
- Since Skeptical sites rarely mention the rebuttal sites we will only list them in image form and not grant them additional Search engine advantages.
- Can we embed the text they place in there posts in our site for a search engine to find but not display it on our site only links to the rebuttals ? We don’t want to be a resource for the skeptics.
Excellent ideas. I don’t think we need to worry about sceptics’ words being quoted on this new website as we need to educate non-sceptics about sceptics’ arguments.
I’ve found a most disturbing one in facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Global-Warming-Really-Fan-Page/275427291786 and the author’s website: http://globalwarmingreally.blogspot.com.au/
Look at this Australian facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/australianclimatemadness and it’s website: http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/
I see no harm in referring to these websites as long as we have counter argument to them all. 🙂