Convincing The “Few” Climate-Change Skeptics?

The few?

THE FEW climate-change “skeptics” with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.

First, this is an appeal to authority fallacy. It’s the same sort of argument we see the left make against so-called “chickenhawks.” Apparently, for the left, only soldiers and officers can have an opinion about and only scientists can have an opinion about climate change.
As for the “few” climate-change skeptics, it would seem as though by one measure the “climate-changers” are in the minority in the scientific community:

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the ”primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for ”catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that—whatever the cause may be—the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.

Of course, we should also recognize that there’s a difference between a scientist recognizing that our planet’s climate is happening (it is) and a scientist think it’s Humvees and GMC Yukons that are causing that change.
And that such change will end in global apocalypse.
I think Mr. John Holdren (the author of this piece) is being a bit factitious by alluding to the “few” scientists who don’t recognize climate change. I wouldn’t doubt that there really are few scientists who don’t recognize that our planet’s climate trends are in constant flux. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a broad consensus on the Al Gore school of climate change theory.