However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position ta

However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position taken up by the other side is "There is some room for skepticism about what that model says will happen in the future" then the no-skepticism side has already lost. But the position of the other side here is not that there is room for skepticism, it's that industry should not be disrupted for any reason, and that any amount of money necessary should be thrown at funding research that is guaranteed to cast doubt on the idea of global warming. Maybe that's not your position, but it's sure as hell the position of the sources of most of the money that's spent doing "skeptical climate research" and lobbying against emissions reductions (which, btw, are in all likelihood an extremely good idea even if AGW is not true, based on all the arguments that environmentalists used to focus on before debate was shifted exclusively to AGW, which IMO is rather the red herring here...). I'd have a lot more sympathy for these guys if they weren't largely allied (and I'm using "allied" rather loosely, half the time it's actually the same groups) with the fucktards that spend millions every year funding "research" aimed at convincing the public that evolution is a myth. When you throw in with morons, you lose credibility, and the anti-AGW crowd correlates too damn close for comfort with the anti-evolution crowd, so I just don't care what they have to say, or what their researchers have done. And I'll admit: that's despite the fact that I actually have some real scientific concerns about the degree to which AGW has been proven, and I'm not 100% convinced (though I'm absolutely convinced that just about any of the measures that people suggest to fight global warming are more than justified on other grounds). If it wasn't for the bad rep of the primary forces behind the anti-AGW PR campaigns, I'd probably be far more skeptical here, but the fact is, I've seen these guys play really dirty in a field that I know very well (evolution), and that leaves a terrible taste. They're so seriously wrong on evolution, and I see exactly the same psychological tactics used against AGW (how often have you heard complaints about little more than the scientific establishment "suppressing the truth" re: global warming?), so I take it as a pretty strong Bayesian signal that unless I know a lot about the field, I'm probably best off betting against these dudes by default.