Surprise! James Randi "Skeptical" About AGW

James Randi, known as The Amazing Randi, is a long-time stage magician and professional skeptic / investigator. So it should not have been surprising to anyone to find out that James Randi is also skeptical about the quasi-religion known as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. You could see the little heads of true believers exploding all over Randi's website, in the comments section at the above link. People who pride themselves on their skepticism of religion, the supernatural, and much else, were simply unwilling to accept Randi's simple and honest expression of skepticism over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Some leftist bloggers went particularly ballistic over Randi's independent expression of his reticence to believe in the carbon hysteria that is so fashionable among leftists. To any reasonable person, it is not Randi's problem that so many of the AGW faithful are totally closed-minded to alternative ideas, hypotheses, and points of view. Yet, Randi felt it necessary to explain himself to the intolerant cloned minds, in a separate post.

It is remarkable when a man who has made a career of skepticism, debunking delusions and exposing illusions, should be attacked so reflexively by quasi-religious believers in pseudo-science when he very tentatively expresses a few mild doubts over the "A" in "AGW." Obviously the "Z's" have no insight into their own beliefs and emotional reactions.

Science is not about belief, or having faith in authority. Science is about doing everything you can to disprove a hypothesis -- to falsify theories. The dogmas of modern climate science have never been subjected to the open process of testing and falsification that honest sciences must face. Climate science was adopted by big politics much too early in its lifetime, and was sheltered from normal testing and validation.

Climate science was a baby bird that did not have to crack open its own shell, in other words. It is a deformed weakling, as a result. But a politically protected deformed weakling all the same.

I salute James Randi for having the courage to speak out honestly and clearly in the current atmosphere of carbon hysteria and jihad. Climate McCarthyism is the norm in leftist circles -- whether academic, media, environmental, or political circles. Randi should have known what to expect. Now he does.

More: Some incisive comments from Lubos Motl