//Toni Lavis, do you never check on facts before you reply, to avoid talking nonsense?//

Of course. I thought you might have problems with the definition of climate change simply being changes in climate, so I looked up the online Oxford dictionary. If you have a problem with their definitions, take it up with them.

climate: The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period

change: Make or become different

Since I speak english as a native language, I have no problem with the conjunction formed from those two words. Phrases don't get much simpler than 'climate change': it does what it says on the tin. It means a change in climate.

If you want to pretend that it only refers to anthropogenic climate change and excludes all the natural causes of climate change then that's up to you.

I arksed Johnno 'bout this, 'coz he's one of them leki...leckigock...lexicog... one of them who people who writes dictionaries, right? An he says... he says.... 'usage defines meaning'. Or summat like that anyway. Bloody useless. What's that s'posed to mean, eh? So I arks Davo instead, right, he's a geophysiotherapist, an I says, 'Davo, you know it used to be freezing, right, and cavemen could hunt woolly mammoths for tea? So how come it stopped being freezing and they had to hunt, I dunno, pigs instead? When they didn't have any power stations? How'd they do that, then? Make it warm without power stations?' I dunno. Something about 'Milla Jovovich - some model, I looked her up, she was the weird chick in the Fifth Element' and 'plate techno'. I reckon these scientists just make it up as they go along, mate.

Michel Shermer, cited by AJ Philips [1] strays well away from any accepted principles of science or commonsense. He labels persistent failure to come to terms with indisputable evidence for a proposition as “denial” but avoids coining a label for persistent claims that a proposition which by its very nature is not susceptible to verification by evidence or by experiment or by confirmed observation is scientific fact. If there were such a term it would apply to the propositions of eugenics and the A part of AGW. Some of his other examples are specious.

Shermer asks us to accept the counterintuitive conspiracy theory that the 9/11 murders were committed using airliners expertly guided, without backup help, by Arabs who had failed elementary pilot training, acting on a plan worked out by terrorists holed up in a remote cave. He doesn’t accept the commonsense step police take in investigating a new crime – asking who benefits. The 9/11 beneficiaries stand out in the obscenely misnamed “Patriot Act” and in the militarisation of police and in pretexts for endless colonial wars.

He’s right about some other propositions such as those about the Holocaust (Allied soldiers opened the camps, survivors told what they’d seen, and the Krauts detailed their own crimes in extensive documentation) and about evolution (readily demonstrated in lab experiments with short-lived species) and about tobacco (demonstrated in real time by its results and its mechanism traced from go to woe) and about vaccines (extensive and ongoing real time surveys). However all that is openly directed by Shermer to bolstering belief in the political hype based on AGW.

[1] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1&q=evidence+for+anthropogenic+climate+change

Emperor Julian,

Michael Shermer isn't a 9/11 truther. He wouldn't be a reputable sceptic if he was. Sceptic organisations everywhere would disown him if that were the case.

Here's an article he even wrote speaking out against, and discrediting, 9/11 conspiracies and conspiracy theorists...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-shermer/911-truthers-a-pack-of-li_b_84154.html

Oh, I read that wrong.

It is you, EmperorJulian, who is the 9/11 truther; criticising Michael Shermer for speaking out against the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Your dubious use of the term "conspiracy theory" threw me off.

I believe you have just provided us with an example of what is known as 'crank magnetism'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29#Crank_magnetism
http://www.livescience.com/23027-link-between-climate-denial-and-conspiracy-beliefs-sparks-conspiracy-theories.html

Suddenly I don't feel the need to defend Shermer anymore.

Presumably a “9/11 truther” is someone who purports to know the truth about how the deed was set up and who conspired to do so. I don’t so purport. Shermer and AJ Philips do purport to know a bunch of bush Arabs living in holes in Afghanistan conspired to hijack airliners and run them, with deadly accuracy and without skilled pilots, into three iconic buildings. WTC7 presumably collapsed all on its own, maybe from burning bits of paper falling on it. The actual beneficiaries of the events, who later lied their heads off about Iraqi WMDs, had no part on it. Evidence? Well that’s what the beneficiaries told the world, evidence enough for true believers..

I, among millions of others, don’t know how it was worked but dismiss the conspiracy theory emanating from the beneficiaries as bollocks. The truth can be arrived at only by an exhaustive, open public inquiry (and not the sort of Earl Warren whitewash that followed the murder of JFK). This is now unlikely following the hasty removal of a large amount of physical evidence, a removal carried out in broad daylight not by the skulking Arabs but by the beneficiaries.

As the world has been denied such a public inquiry the best reconstruction that can be made is based on balance of probabilities – the bush Arabs or the immensely well-equipped and highly motivated beneficiaries. The best that sceptical websites can now rely on is surviving evidence that can’t be credibly reconciled with the conspiracy theory of tribal savages doing it all by themselves.

Not quite, EmperorJulian.

<<Presumably a “9/11 truther” is someone who purports to know the truth about how the deed was set up and who conspired to do so.>>

“Truther” is just a term for conspiracy theorists in general, and is supposed to denote their ‘search for the truth’ or demands that the ‘truth be revealed’ about a given situation.

http://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=define%3Atruther

<<Shermer and AJ Philips do purport to know a bunch of bush Arabs living in holes in Afghanistan conspired to hijack airliners and run them, with deadly accuracy and without skilled pilots, into three iconic buildings.>>

Depends on how you define knowledge. I love seeing my name next to Michael Shermer’s like that, though.

I was learning to fly for a little while before I finally decided that it was just going get too expensive. I’ve flown several different types of commercial jets in simulators before. The hard part is landing. Even talking off is quite easy in good conditions. But finding big buildings on a clear day and heading straight for them is nothing. The GPSs in commercial jets are not much different to the ones you get in cars (or they never used to be, at least), so all one would need is the co-ordinants.

Try it yourself. Get a 3D joystick, install a copy of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator (which uses the physics engines of actual flight simulators) and fly a 737 into the Twin Towers. It’s really not that hard. It would be particularly easy if you’d had flight lessons in cruising as the hijackers did.

But this idea that the American government mass-murdered its own people to start a war is too far fetched for me. The idea that no-one blows the whistle on this, or lets anything leak, seems equally improbable. The same goes for the conspiratorial thinking from some on the Left regarding ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Agra’; and from those on the Right regarding, well, anything to do with academia, really.

When it comes to such conspiratorial thinking, I think Maddox said it best… http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=911_morons