Why can't global warming deniers ever keep their story straight?

The deniers don't have any facts to back up their statements, so they have to keep changing their stories and their rationales. When all else fails they just use personal attacks.

Fighting against the weight of scientific evidence must be difficult and obviously cannot be done rationally.

Well, first the chicken littles said there was global warming. But when their "hockey stick" temperature line was proven, by peer review, to be completely false, then it became "climate change".

The problem for the chicken littles is that the Earth has / had been warming since the end of the most recent mini Ice Age. And as data has been acquired, the scientists have found NO correlation between CO2 and temperature. Temperatures haven't changed much in the past couple of years, since solar activity has quieted down after many years of activity.

No only has there never been any consensus, every time the data or the models supporting the chicken little theory has been peer reviewed, it has been shot down as seriously flawed or completely debunked.

I'll trust the scientists, not the politicians or Al Gore.

I suggest the fifty year + plans of the status quo were knocked off the axis when An Inconvenient Truth made us pay attention to their hidden agendas. So what were they hiding? Besides the peak oil and GMO issues, the failure of public infrastructure to protect lives or property, the demand for profits over persons by corporate/state entities. And if you profit from stocks in oil, that includes you. It is very difficult for many to see their own reflection as a willing participant in the imperialist acts of the government, the mass wasting of our collective affluence due to /interest//profits///love of money. Good and loyal subjects will deny any fault for crisis or consequence, it is part of the indoctrination, the nationalist curriculum, in my view. Rile us up, get a load of trouble.

Of course, that deflects from the message, responsibility for the mob's actions. Suits the suits just fine, business as usual.

Sorry Suth but you are getting your information wrong.

Here is what the APS says about Lord Monckton's article:

"The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

Also

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

They didn't get the Global Warming Deniers newsletter to give them their talking points. Afterall, no one on either side of the debate thinks for himself. You just pick a side and repeat what you're told, right? </sarcasm>

Listen, I don't have a horse in this race. All I know for certain is that there is a great deal of obsfucation in the matter. To me, the science isn't conclusive either way regarding human caused climate change. I do know quite a bit about modeling (but in quantitative finance), and I know how challenging the models are in this stuff. Anyone who wants to close discussion (or limit it to two opposing "stories") just isn't thinking deeply about the topic.

ADDITION: Even though a statement from the APS does not end debate in my mind, I have to give props to beren for posting some real, certifiable information.

I believe global warming is a natural occurrence and we have helped it along in a small manner. Look at the ice caps, they found fossils frozen deep in the polar ice caps. what does that mean? It means that at one time the polar cap was not frozen. This has happened before and it's happening again. In the age of the earth, we have been here a relatively short time, we don't know what happened billions of years ago. It's a natural progression, but that shouldn't stop us from developing alternative fuels and cleaner air.

Perhaps because the 'experts' are worse than our politicians when it comes to flip flopping:

The American Physical Society, which represents 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on "climate change." The organization now says that many of its members do not buy into OwlGore's apocalyptic man-made global warming scheme.

The Physics & Society Forum of the American Physical Society wrote, "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

Perhaps the primary instigator for this was the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton, which mathematically proves that there is no "climate crisis." Monckton uses 30 equations to prove that "the computer models used by the UN's climate panel (the IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is 'climate sensitivity' (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2's effect on temperature in the IPCC's latest climate assessment report." In other words ... the UN's models were wrong. They were programmed to give you these fraudulently hyped numbers to scare people into acting.

Here are a few other facts published by Lord Monckton:

The IPCC's 2007 climate summary overstated CO2's impact on temperature by 500-2000%;

CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;

Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;

The IPCC's values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;

The IPCC's values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;

"Global warming" halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;

Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;

The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists' draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;

It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;

Mars, Jupiter, Neptune's largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;

In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

What decided me was the fact that the global warming debate was over before anyone was able to examine any facts. And any evidence to the contrary is just blown off as Scientists being paid off by "big oil" (be sure to use a low threatening voice when you say that).

Another thing that leaves me scratching my head is that no matter what happens with the weather it is proof positive that global warming is occurring.

The capper though is that the people trying to scare us with the gloom and doom are the same ones profiting off carbon credits and other scams.

You've got it a bit backward. al Gore cannot produce any peer reviewed data and any peer reviewed data depends on who one's peers are. Get Gore's book and check his sources and then check the sources of his sources. It takes a while but is fun from a research point of view.

I see lots of story shifts from both sides. You aren't stating the positions of one group, but of differing lines of thought, none of which are any less likely than the other. Many of the scientists who were backing Gore have had second thoughts also. I don't think it's scientifically possible to prove any of these beliefs or theories, because they are all just theories based on trends and the trends themselves are inconsistent.

You are assigning various attributes to a collective group that does not collaborate whatsoever on their positions.

The same could be said why global warming proponents cannot keep THEIR stories straight as well.