Chris Mooney seems like he may finally be coming around and discovering that the denialists (and anti-science types in general) won’t be swayed by polite reasoned arguments.

My feeling is that he’s been clarifying the old bridge-building comments for a while now. He has, AFAIK, always known that denialists won’t be swayed by polite reasoned arguments, but his point was not to alienate whole segments of a population just because a small number of them were unreasonable. E.g. you can alienate every religious person out there by attacking their beliefs or you can reach out and form relationships with some of them, which would further isolate the extremists you can’t reason with regardless.

For that, he was called accommodationist and on numerous blogs told he was wrong and that there could be no working with religious people. Six months later Dawkins was doing exactly what Mooney was advocating (not that I think Mooney’s arguments had anything to do with that) by writing articles with one of the bishops(?), and I noted there weren’t any comments calling Dawkins an accommodationist.

Anyway, Mooney has clarified his position several times and maybe even backed off a bit from the cheerful optimism of his original statements, and I find I quite enjoy reading his posts this last year or so.

Of course, this could just be my brain rewriting history and my interpretation is quite wrong.

Workin’ on it.

I know of other academic institutions with involvement with the energy industry, I don’t know how anyone can believe anything that comes out from them:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1121-04.htm
Thursday, November 21, 2002 by the New York Times

Exxon-Led Group Is Giving a Climate Grant to Stanford
by Andrew Revkin

Four big international companies, including the oil giant Exxon Mobil, said yesterday that they would give Stanford University $225 million over 10 years for research on ways to meet growing energy needs without worsening global warming.

Auto.com/Bloomberg News
October 26, 2000
http://www.auto.com/industry/iwirc26_20001026.htm

LONDON — BP Amoco Plc, the world’s No. 3 publicly traded oil company, and Ford Motor Co. said they will give Princeton University $20 million over 10 years to study ways to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. BP said it will give $15 million. Ford, the world’s second-biggest automaker, is donating $5 million.

Speaking as an alumnus of Carleton, I am ashamed that this nonsense is being promoted in a science class.

Perhaps you should send them an email or something saying so?

That is exactly what I was thinking when I read comments 5 & 7, mostly because of the unimaginative attempt at parody with the user names.