On my latest podcast, I had the fortune of hosting Michael Shermer, who is the founder of Skeptic magazine and author of the important new book The Believing Brain. Shermer is also a self-identified libertarian, but one who drew much attention in 2006 when he dropped his global warming skepticism and embraced the scientific consensus that we’re causing climate change to happen.

However, oddly, Shermer still isn’t really worried about global warming. He falls into roughly the same camp as Bjorn Lomborg, arguing that it isn’t likely to be a big deal and will be something we can manage. Here is Shermer’s summary of Lomborg’s answers (in the film Cool It) to two key questions that one must confront if one accepts global warming is happening and caused by humans.

Now, this baffles me. I don’t understand how anyone could be so confident warming would be on the low end of the projections, and not that big a deal.

When I had Shermer on the show, it was not my goal to debate him about global warming…

The magazine New Scientist has devoted a special issue to the “Age of Denial,” including a lot of examples of climate deniers’ efforts to distort and attack climate science.

DeSmogBlog’s own Richard Littlemore has an essay in the issue entitled “Living in denial: How corporations manufacture doubt,” which discusses how polluting industries have followed the tobacco playbook in order to confuse the public about climate change.

Littlemore writes:
“The doubt industry has ballooned in the past two decades. There are now scores of think tanks pushing dubious and confusing policy positions, and dozens of phoney grass-roots organisations created to make those positions appear to have legitimate following.”

Our third and last audio interview from the Environmental Wars Conference was with Michael Shermer, the host of the event and founder/editor of Skeptic Magazine.

Click here to listen to a 6-minute conversation about the conference and its speakers. He makes the interesting point that although he has recently converted to the ranks of "believers" in climate change, he feels odd using that term, because he says that once the scientific evidence is in, it makes no more sense to say that you are "believe" in global warming than that you believe in gravity. It's just the way it is.

Someone should tell that to all the "skeptics" out there who try to spin it differently…