"James, you've always struck me as a rational person ...So how is it that you're so at odds with "mainstream science" ... on this one?"
To which I have to reply, first, is that a rhetorical question, or are you really asking? (I don't think I've ever tried to hide my views on this, after all.) (And also, since I am off to France on the 13th, I wouldn't want to be accused of 'leaving the room' once I provoked a disagreement.)
Second, "mainstream science" is an oxymoron. Science is not faith; not faith in its findings (which are always provisional); nor faith in its methods (which are many). Being at odds with received opinion is what science is.
Third, I might well be wrong in thinking that anthropogenic climate change is minimal (though I am pretty sure I am not). I am not a specialist in climatology, and would not claim to authority on the science, nor even that strong an understanding of the science (I realise that that might read like a gift to anyone who disagrees with me, and what do I care what they think, though I am pretty sure that I understand ten times more than most environmentalists who post in happy ignorance.)
Fourth, I know when I am being railroaded, and I am surprised that you don't. Indeed I am constantly surprised that people who would not dream of accepting a government, or United Nations' or government scientists' argument that terrorism demands special government powers lap up the same argument when the threat is 'climate change' (as if 'climate change' was anything but tautology).
Fifth, arguments put by the environmentalists that anthropogenic climate change is upon us are so palpably dishonest and contradictory, that no sane person could adopt them without a wilful suspension of disbelief. When I see the IPCC report that water levels might rise by an inch in the next century cited to support the argument that they will rise fifteen feet, then I think that the case is wilfully alarmist; or similarly, when I see conjunctural weather patterns, like Britain's recent floods or Hurricane Katrina attributed to anthropogenic climate change on page one of the newspapers (only to be retracted at a later date on page 21 later on).
Sixth, all the people who want me to worry about climate change are the same ones who lied to me about the dangers inherent in genetically modifed foods, told me that one third of the British public would have CJD by 1997, also that one in ten people in the UK would have contracted AIDS, told us that DDT was so dangerous that we ought to prefer malaria, told us that nuclear power was innately dangerous (but seem to be having a rethink), continue to tell us that building dams is wrong, opposed the MMR vaccine on specious grounds, have conspired to wreck the UK housebuilding sector, and are basically people I would not trust to change a lightbulb.
Seventh, all of this theory rests on the empirical fact that the temperature has risen by less than one degree over the last century, which is extrapolated with computer modelled theories of how the climate works - which is to say that they are thoroughly ropey hypotheses.
Doug also asks
"Is it just that you've been following the RCP/LM/Sp!ked line on this for so long that it's too hard to change?"
To which I have to say that it is very nice of you to offer me the get-out clause that I am just some kind of parrot, but I cannot evade my responsibilities quite so easily. Looking at my scrapbook I see you might have a point about sticking to my guns: I have been dismissing climate change for the last seventeen years, since writing 'The Catastrophe is Capitalism', a response to Margaret Thatcher's Climate change speeech at Bracknell (The Next Step, 1 June 1990). What 'line' the RCP took, or Spiked takes now is as much my doing as anyone else's.
And lastly, Doug writes
"unlike Alex Cockburn, who has an aristocrat's distrust of science as being too complicated and wonky, especially now that he's become country gentry with some quirky opinions (as Lou Proyect put it recently)."
Lou Proyect, Alex Cockburn; it is not really such a hard choice, is it?