Nobody's opinion is worth anything when it's based on ignorance. If your opinion on a scientific issue is based on what you read on blogs, when you're disagreeing with 90+% of scientific experts, your opinion is utterly irrelevant.
As a side note, for the hundredth time I'd like to point out that Huddler is not a blog. It's a website with a discussion board, wiki articles, product reviews, etc. It doesn't have a blog component. People who call Huddler a blog clearly don't even know what a blog is.
As for ClimateAudit (CA) winning 'Science Blog of the Year', that was based entirely on an online vote. Basically a bunch of deniers who read CA went and voted for it every day. It won a popularity contest, which had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of its content. It's like Fox News being the most popular news program. Just because something is popular doesn't mean there's any quality to it.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/02/we
Just to show you how little this ';award'; means, WattsUpWithThat won it in 2008. It ';beat'; blogs with real scientific content like RealClimate and NASA Watch.
http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-How relevant is ones opinion on Y!A when they provide no link to supporting information?
Randall says ';Right - more people found it convincing than found other blogs convincing.';
Not necessarily - more people voted for it, or at least voted for it more times. So what? Deniers are convinced by what they want to be true. We already know there are a lot of deniers on the internet.
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Maybe you should try convincing scientists instead of people who are ignorant of climate science. You love sports analogies - if a bunch of children vote that Tom Brady is the worst QB in the NFL, I guess that makes it true eh?
Science trumps public votes.
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No relevance whatsoever, except with their own choir.
a blog because they are not part the evil socialist conspiracy that has mind control over all those dumb, jackass, Gore lovin scientists
A blog like huddler, or like the 2007 co-winner of the ';Science Blog of the Year'; award, climateaudit?
Nobody's ';opinion'; is enough to justify attempting to sharply reduce an activity by taxing it. That would be justified only with evidence. You can't win the argument as a function of ';what'; and so you try to make it an argument about ';who.';
EDIT - so ';Science Blog of the Year'; wasn't just hand-picked by an individual or panel, but rather was the result of a poll of on-line readers. Right - more people found it convincing than found other blogs convincing.
It doesn't mean anything to me. I never was to big on abrogating my thinking to others. I like to discover things on my own and only believe them (limited belief) when I have looked at enough evidence for it to be convincing. For example, I created a graph with actual measure CO2 increases per year versus measured land sea temperature.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37398063@N0
Hopefully it is visible. I found that peaks of temperature proceeded most CO2 peaks particularly noticeable at 1998 which is what I was looking for. I would like to hear an explanation from an alarmist explaining why variations in emissions of CO2 (which are supposedly dominated by humans) follow temperature. But those sorts of things don't really matter. What matters apparently is we all act like lemmings get behind the ';Man is at fault so we must empower the government movement';.
Just because an individual doesn't supply ';a link'; to support their opinions doesn't mean their ideas lack merit. An thoughtful opinion can spark independent research and offer a unique perspective on an issue that may not have yet appeared in any mainstream publication.
Have we become so dependent on Wiki-facts that we fail to trust our own ideas? Must all ideas be backed by a consensus, or at the very least, ';a link';?
Scientist rarely go out in the field. Most seem to sit and look at all the info that they have gathered from their sources. It is the people that live in those areas that they get their sources from, that have seen the real effects of global warming. Are we scientists? Certainly not. But as obsevers of our environment, we certainly have relevance in our opinions.
Read your own words %26gt;scientific opinion
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june0
On May 19th 2008, OISM announced that over 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, signed a petition that states, ';... There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate...';
Signatories include such luminaries as theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, MIT's atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen and first National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz. More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious national Academy of Sciences.
Mainstream scientific opinions have been constantly proved wrong, after all remember when scientists believed that light couldn't be a wave because a wave needed a medium to travel through?
You might equally well ask why do some people not trust the Vatican to tell us about god. Because we understand that their beliefs are based on faith, not proof.
A scientific opinion should by definition be backed up with evidence. Otherwise it's speculation or politics or pragmatism or religion - but it's not scientific.
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