Periodically, some readers accuse me of characterizing climate skepticism in an overly broad manner. There are various subspecies, they insist. So I should stop painting all climate skeptics as frothing conspiracy mongers. My rejoinder is that I base my characterization on the loudest, most relentless climate skeptics, who have made themselves the representative voices of their movement. In a nod to their different plumages, the climate analyst David Victor has in a recent talk identified three types of "denialism": Paid shills, actual skeptics, and hobbyists, the latter constituting the majority. Andy Revkin at his New York Times Dot Earth blog has excerpted highlights of the talk, including this passage that probably doesn't still well with the missionary contingent in the climate-concerned sphere:
under pressure from denialists we in the scientific community have spent too much time talking about consensus. That approach leads us down a path that, at the end, ...
