> So, in a very precise and limited way, I appreciate when people like
> Paltridge -- despite my many disagreements with them otherwise --
> write about these issues in an accessible way. Even though there is
> the danger of giving aid and comfort to denialists. But what can you
> do?
Hunt down sources that are more careful in getting it all right, not just the parts requiring a corrective. The scientists at RealClimate, while tending towards the technical, are very patient with handling comments from laypeople. While most of those tend to be from inchoate (and sometimes genuinely naive) skeptics, there are also people who come more despairing than necessary. Their "start here" page is also a wealth of sober explanation:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/
I'd particularly recommend the IPCC AR4 FAQ list, which is very accessibly written and deserves to be far more widely read than it seems to be. The Skeptical Science website and Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming (all linked from the above) are both invaluable not just for consciousness raising, but also for careful quantification of the risks as they are understood.
My beef with using Paltridge (again, as I understand him from Sourcewatch) as a corrective for nontechnical sorts is that I'm guessing that what he gets right he gets right because it happens to support a narrative of "do nothing". That's no more useful than ditching nuclear in order to get right with Nature instead of for solid technical reasons to do so. As an exemplar, it's terrible.
I might note that I abandoned Tim Flannery's _The Weather Makers_ two chapters in because of his getting small technical details wrong on practically every page, even though he supposedly gets the broad strokes right.
> I do think (and again, this is an instance of finding a point or
> points of agreement in the midst of debate) that [Lovelock]'s right to remind
> those of us who're focused on climate change that there are many
> unanswered and difficult questions.
Unanswered and difficult questions are alive and well if you look at the sources above, but they actually cite why they are so. The primary complaint about Lovelock (and comparison to Dyson) is not that he's old, it's that he doesn't specify what he's casting aspersions on and why. This kind of hit-and-run tactic is a contrarian favorite, and hey, why not? You don't account for your sources, and a responsibly explanatory response takes twenty times the effort.
And don't forget that it was Lovelock saying a couple years ago with unqualified certainty and to much eyerolling that we're all gonna die.
-- Andy