A respected professor at MIT provides a reasoned argument for skepticism, and the response is another round of automatic downdings, rather than addressing the substance of his argument? Says something about cheerleading for an orthodoxy, about the self-reinforcing and self-congratulatory nature of some blog commenting, and nothing about the merits of the issue.

Ignoring risks can be lethal, so can overestimating them. You dampen growth prematurely or excessively, you cause unnecessary suffering and death - and degradation of envirionment in other ways. High standards of living are associated with higher environmental standards.

So why not look at this as an exercise in rational risk management, and looks for areas of building consensus that are not dependent on agreement on controverted theories? I have longed agreed, for example, with self-proclaimed climate agnostic (and therefore what? junk scientist, industry dupe, beclowned bile belching bozo?) Charles Krauthammer about having gas taxes, and I don’t need to have a definitive belief in any specific projection about global warming and its causes to do so. I can support for other reasons, such as promoting innovation in alternate energy and weakening the dependence of democracies on oil-peddling autocracies. I can oppose some green schemes also withoutbeing confident about the projects - the “trade” in cap and trade can be an invitation to fraud on a global scale if the traders are countries that are rife with corruption. I can accept the possibility of Co2 caused global warming, and ask whether some measures to reduce carbon omissions are a reasonable risk management measure in light of all of their costs and benefits.

Some have argued that LGF is committed to a meta-position - about the need for rational reporting and analysis, rather than fixed positions on issues like wealth distribution, role of government etc. That is a real service. But it is undermined, rather than advanced, by a trigger happy approach to typecasting participants or positions in the global warming debate.