Why Are There So Few "Friends of Science"?
Rounding up the usual climate change "sceptics" on the domestic (Canadian front), we have the website www.friendsofscience.org, "Providing Insight on Climate Change."
FOS embraces that same small group of superannuated academics who have been so prominent recently in asking the Canadian government to back away from any policy action addressing the problem of climate change. The FOS Scientific Advisory Board, Dr. Tim Ball, Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Dr. Chris de Freitas, Dr. Madhav Khandekar, Dr. Tad Murty, and Dr. Tim Patterson, were all signatories to the anti-climate science petition.
FOS also boasts significant overlap with the U.S.-based deniers who run the Envirotruth website.
Giving credit where it's due, Envirotruth acknowledges on its site where its funding comes from, a little detail that FOS apparently decided to skip over.
That said, the FOS folks can at least count. Where "Envirotruth has amassed a list of the 'Top Ten Myths' surrounding the climate change dialogue. More" and then lists 16 "myths," the FOSsickers actually stop at 10. Their myths are no more credible, but their numerical accuracy is reassuring.
But, again, why is it that the IPCC can find 2,500 of the world's top climate scientists to agree that climate change is a real and pressing threat; Dr. Gordon McBean can round up 90 of Canada's most accomplished experts in the field in less than a week to sign a petition arguing in favour of federal action on climate change; and yet the little cabal of "friends" and "truth" tellers is so exclusive?
Sometimes being unorthodox means standing up courageously against conventional wisdom. But sometimes it just means that you're wrong.
