There are many things to say on this, and in most of them, Ian speaks for me, but I’d like to add just one illustration of why the denialist position is self-defeating.

Whenever people mention the shift from “global warming” to “climate change” as a recent example of the Liberal Media Covering Its Tracks or something, they shoot themselves in the foot.

For instance, the IPCC was founded in 1988 (before the major political arguments on this began) – take a guess as to what the “CC” stands for. You can’t recently change to a term that’s been in use for 30 years.

Secondly, one needs only read the Luntz Memo to see that it was the anti-science crowd who advocated a shift to the term “climate change” for political reasons, and they did it in 2001. (Page 12 of the PDF.)

Despite this, the schmuck you quoted still acts as if he was right.

(Btw, Ian, Dr. Weaver was on campus the other day and delivered an excellent talk based loosely on his book, which I highly recommend. Afterwards, we got involved in an interesting discussion on the funding sources of these anti-science groups, and he informed me that pre-Kyoto, the libertarians actually accepted the science, and were trying to debate policy. Kyoto apparently led to them shifting to antiscience. I haven’t verified this claim yet, nor do I have an explanation as to why, but it’s definitely something I’ll look into.)