Quote from: Wilikon on December 17, 2013, 07:27:25 PM

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As a scientist myself, it became clear to me that the contrarians were not capable of providing the science to support their skepticism on climate change. The evidence simply does not exist to justify continued denial that climate change is caused by humans and will be bad. There is always legitimate debate around the cutting edge of research, something we see regularly. But with climate change, science that has been established, constantly tested, and reaffirmed for decades was routinely called into question.

Over and over, solid peer-reviewed science was insulted as corrupt, while blog posts from fossil-fuel-funded groups were cited as objective fact. Worst of all, they didnt even get the irony of quoting oil-funded blogs that called university scientists biased.

The end result was a disservice to science and to rational exploration, not to mention the scholarly audience we are proud to have cultivated. When 97 percent of climate scientists agree that man is changing the climate, we would hope the comments would at least acknowledge if not reflect such widespread consensus. Since that was not the case, we needed more than just an ad hoc approach to correct the situation.

The answer was found in the form of proactive moderation. About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers. When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isnt a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/reddits-science-forum-banned-climate-deniers-why-dont-all-newspapers-do-the-same/

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In other scientific news CRYOSAT SATELLITE FINDS ARCTIC ICE INCREASED 50% IN VOLUME

Around 90 per cent of the increase is due to retention of older ice
This years multi-year ice is now around 30 cm thicker than last year
Experts claim increase does not indicate a reversal in long-term trends

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2524770/ESA-satellite-reveals-polar-ice-INCREASED-50-year.html

Remember the ozone layer hole? Wasn't that caused directly by the human use of CFCs? The atmosphere is tiny in comparison to the mass of the earth, I don't think people realize that and think since they can see more sky than they can land at any given moment. The big issue, or where the debate really should be about, is how much of an impact we are having; both in causing acceleration with past habits and or how our changes are affecting that acceleration. The earth has been warming long before the first factory was built, just look at sea levels over the past 20,000 years (120m rise!). I don't think banning anyone though is the right thing to do, IMHO. We always need the voice of opposition.