I'm not really obsessed with this issue. In fact, I have no real objection to the notion of man-made global warming other than the various arguments employed to support it are so consistently fallacious.

And that's what truly fascinates me.

We could be arguing about fish and I'd be drawn by this effect.

Bob: You're in the pay of the industrial herring lobby!
Frank: No, I just find herring delicious. And where's the evidence it causes cancer of the spleen?
Bob: How can you be so callous when people's lives are at stake? We don't have time to argue any longer, we must ban herring now. People are suffering!
Frank: I was just asking...

(Needless to say, I'd be more suspicious of Bob.)

Here [pdf] is the transcript of a very interesting debate about global warming (which includes Michael Crichton). According to the Iain Murray at NRO, before the debate, 57% of the audience thought global warming was a crisis, and 30% did not. Afterwards, apparently, that pendulum had swung the other way, 42% versus 46%.

A cynic (who, me?) might suggest that this sort of result illustrates just why 'alarmists' are trying to close down the debate on the issue.

It's not hard to see why the audience was unimpressed. I'm halfway through and most the anti-warming-crisis arguments rebut common pro-crisis arguments (apparently) using science. Like so:

Extreme weather events occur all the time. There’s, there is really no evidence of systematic increases, judging from reports from bodies ranging from the National Hurricane Center to the U.N.’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, outside the tropics the theory of such storms and variability says that the variability should decrease in a warmer world... [Richard Lindzen]

In constrast, most of the pro-crisis arguments boil down to : (1) things are warming up, (2) there are always quacks who deny science, and (3) the science is settled, believe us; the debate is over.

Examples:

Snow cover and mountain glaciers are decreasing markedly. It’s a long list. The list goes on. None of these observational facts is a surprise to the climate science community. They are what we had predicted.

(You mean after that period back in the 1970s and early 1980s where you predicted global cooling? Really, it's a multiple choice test with only two checkboxes, and it's taken y'all two tries to get the right one.)

Again, tobacco companies spent millions trying to show that nicotine delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s because that was a distraction from the far more solid case that, that linked tobacco to lung cancer. That was a distraction and a red herring. These arguments are examples of pseudo debates, scientific sounding points that are designed not to fool the experts, but to sow confusion and doubt in the minds of the lay public.

(Okay, I get it: Michael Crichton and other "deniers" are like tobacco companies -- on the take from someone. Now please get on with the part where you refute what they've got wrong, rather than drawing these ad homen parallels.)

Despite that natural skepticism, the national academies of all eight, G8 countries, all the major scientific societies, even the White House have agreed with a scientific consensus on this matter...

(Well, I guess that settles it! Consuming cabohydrates really is is helpful for losing weight! Oh, wait, that was so twenty years ago.)

There's pages and pages of blather from the pro-crisis panelists, who go on with extended analogies about how people get things wrong, and how the public is deceived -- implying endless parallels between sceptics and flat-earthers. I kept thinking: "Yes, okay, but get to the point when you actually refute something they've said." Intellectually, it's so unsatisfying. It's like struggling to open a blister package and finding there's actually nothing inside.

And it's rather weird to hear them make point #1 -- that the world is warming up -- over and over, since all of their opponents started out by agreeing that's true. The question is whether this warming is (a) human-caused, (b) significant, and also (c) harmful. On these, so far, they have remainly largely mute. It's as though there were two different conversations going on.

Or as though they actually had nothing to offer on those points.

You can't, of course, tell which view is actually right by observing such cues. But it does appear, to the observer, as though one group is acting as if they had something to hide.

(It's Bob, I tell you...)