Phil,

There's a lot of bad science out there and people should be skeptical about accepting conclusions that have significant economic implications. There's a big difference though in assuming a climate model is bogus because programs can be bogus and actually doing the intellectual excercise of independently validating or rejecting the equations and parameters used. This is beyond most people although probably not beyond some people here taking the easy rejection route. At some point the public has to be able to trust scientists with a grasp of the subject far beyond anything the general public has. Unfortunately much of the public is so scientifically illiterate that they can't tell who the real scientists are and who the pretenders are.

Lomborg is a case in point. He is not a real environmental scientist and made many false claims in his work. I believe however they were honest mistakes at least for the most part and that is why his official criticism was rejected. He also made a very good point that too many extreme environmentalists ignore about poverty being more deadly that trace environmental hazards. However, people who have spent a lot of hard work and good faith developing models and collecting data are likely to take offense at being labeled frauds by someone who obviously has many of his facts wrong. It's nothing more than the reaction you see here towards BD even when people try to give him the benefit of the doubt on motives.

I don't understand your slam against Sagan. The nuclear winter work is the basis for estimates on the effect of large impactors. It is quite obvious that the basic ideas behind this work have not been rejected. If Sagan got the magnitude off that is quite common in FIRST pass modeling. It can continue past that without good data to validate a model against. Sagan would not be the first well known scientist to make an honest major error. Even Nobel Proze winners have done it. Questioning even established experts is part of the value of the scientific process as Sagan points out in "Demon Haunted World". Nothing in the books by Sagan I've read indicate a particular political bias either.

Regards,
Mark