[...]
As a scientist myself, it became clear to me that the contrarians were not capable of providing the science to support their “skepticism” on climate change. The evidence simply does not exist to justify continued denial that climate change is caused by humans and will be bad. There is always legitimate debate around the cutting edge of research, something we see regularly. But with climate change, science that has been established, constantly tested, and reaffirmed for decades was routinely called into question.
Over and over, solid peer-reviewed science was insulted as corrupt, while blog posts from fossil-fuel-funded groups were cited as objective fact. Worst of all, they didn’t even get the irony of quoting oil-funded blogs that called university scientists biased.
The end result was a disservice to science and to rational exploration, not to mention the scholarly audience we are proud to have cultivated. When 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man is changing the climate, we would hope the comments would at least acknowledge if not reflect such widespread consensus. Since that was not the case, we needed more than just an ad hoc approach to correct the situation.
The answer was found in the form of proactive moderation. About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers. When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn’t a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/reddits-science-forum-banned-climate-deniers-why-dont-all-newspapers-do-the-same/---------------------------------------------------------------------
In other scientific news CRYOSAT SATELLITE FINDS ARCTIC ICE INCREASED 50% IN VOLUME
Around 90 per cent of the increase is due to retention of older ice
This year’s multi-year ice is now around 30 cm thicker than last year
Experts claim increase does not indicate a reversal in long-term trends
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2524770/ESA-satellite-reveals-polar-ice-INCREASED-50-year.htmlIs it as easy as that. We see so many false or unsubstantiated claims from the warmists in these pages and it seems fair to challenge them. However anyone who does challenge them simply gets written off as a denier and can often be subject to abuse.
Most "deniers" accept that Co2 is a greenhouse gas. Many just dispute the extremity of the effects, be they observed or predicted. Is that denial?