By the way, for those wondering what is really happening here:
It's called a manufactured controversy. The same thing that's been done with evolution/intelligent design, the same thing that's been done with the link between tobacco and cancer, etc.
It's a simple and effective PR strategy: get a few scientists or institutions to disagree with a specific position and spend a good deal of money to make sure they get attention. The public, unaware of actual scientific publications, will tend to think that nothing has been proven yet.
It's best summed up by line from a tobacco industry memo a few decades ago:
?Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ?body of fact? that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. ... Spread doubt over strong scientific evidence and the public won?t know what to believe.?
The Discovery Institute, in trying to fight the theory of evolution, actually named their campaign "Teach the Controversy".
Now, the same thing is being done with climate science.
It's not a coincidence that ExxonMobil is one of the largest contributors to most of the institutions that say the evidence is inconclusive.
It's not a coincidence that
Frederick Seitz, who was one of the most influential scientists opposing the idea of climate change, worked as a scientist for the tobacco industry a few decades ago - doing the exact same thing in that public debate.
It's not a coincidence that the Executive Director of the George C. Marshall Institute quit his job and stated that it "consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank."
It's not a coincidence that the Heartland Institute
offered scientists money to come to a conference with the stated goal of getting media attention for the "controversy", nor that their Board of Directors includes the
Director of Economic Policy of General Motors.
It's not a coincidence that only ~50% of the American public think that most climate scientists agree on the matter of global warming, even though over 90% of climate scientists actually do agree on the matter.
I could go on for quite a while, but to any sane mind, the situation should be clear: you "skeptics" are being played like fools through a clever marketing campaign.