Global Warming Opponents Have Gone Bonkers! - Follow-Up

As a follow-up to my entry on Global Warming detractors who are in joyful mood when the APS's Forum on Physics and Society had a newsletter that included a "debate" on global warming, the July 18, 2008 edition of Bob Park's What's New has an even more eloquent comment on this:

1. GOOD LORD! GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS VANDALIZE APS.
Science is open. If better information becomes available scientists rewrite the textbooks with scarcely a backward glance. The Forum on Physics and Society of the APS exists to help us examine all the information on issues such as global climate change. There are physicists who think we don't have warming right, I know one myself. It is therefore entirely appropriate for the Forum to conduct a debate on the pages of its newsletter. A couple of highly-respected physicists ably argued the warming side. Good start. However, on the denier's side was Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who inherited his father's peerage in 2006. Lord Monckton is not a scientist, his degree is in journalism and he's a reporter for the Evening Standard, an English tabloid. Whatever it is that Viscounts do, he may do very well, but he doesn't know squat about physics and his journalism suffers from it. Worse, somebody fed the media the line that Monckton's rubbish meant the APS had changed its position on warming; of course it has not. Few media outlets took the story seriously.

and I was thinking (yes, I do that some time, especially when the moon is full). I recall that when Al Gore was criticized by global warming opponents as not being a scientist when he presented his global warming "disaster movie" in Inconvenient Truth. How come they don't go after Monckton, who isn't a scientist either? And if these people are so impressed that the APS "appears" to change their stand on global warming, how come they are not as impressed when the APS actually made its initial stand (and continues to hold the same opinion) on global warming?

All I see here is that some people are picking and choosing what they want to believe. If they put that much credibility in the APS that by simply having a "dialog" on global warming gave global warming opponents some form of "credible" ally, then how come they also don't put the same amount of credibility on all the other previous issues that the APS and AIP have strong and very clear opinions on? Evolution, anyone? And last time I checked, the AIP still has a webpage with very clear opinion (and a series of peer-reviewed references) on their stand regarding global warming. How come they IGNORE such thing, while grabbing what I've said as the flimsiest of threads?

It makes no sense.

Zz.