Yep, skepticism is a scientific virtue except in matters of global warming, ahem cough, cough oops wrong subject. - Goat in a previous comment thread
I suppose I am belaboring a point here, but it is important to repeat that real scientists, not non-scientific climate change deniers, do engage in practical skepticism each and every time they engage in experimental investigation and use the current climate change model as a guide. Implicit in every scientific experiment is the question of whether or not the current theory is workable. That is the definition of science - the falsifiable theory never verified, only provisionally accepted as operable under the current level of knowledge and understanding.
This is one of the reasons why climate change skeptics continue to misunderstand the whole issue - they simply don't understand the way science works. Once a theory is offered as an explanation for disparate data, its acceptance is provisional upon the theory's ability (a) to account for the data; (b) the theory's ability to predict future experimental results with a relatively high degree of accuracy (scientific theories involve correlation, not causation, thus statistical understanding of the range of experimental results is important and differs between various theories); (c) the theory's ability to withstand scrutiny as experiments refine theoretical language and possible future experimental avenues. For this last one, specifically, as new data emerge, how much does the theory change, and are clauses added to the theory that, perhaps either enhance, or undermine the central premise of the theory (this last is an important codicil to scientific advancement, worked on by the late philosopher Imre Lakatos).
As a model, the current understanding of global climate change works so well precisely because it is fruitful for a variety of experimental avenues, it accounts for disparate data previously understood as separate and understood outside an overarching model, said distinct theories being inadequate to account for a variety of details within the experimental data. As the current model is used as theoretical background to various scientific explorations, its value as a predictor of outcomes is high, indeed extraordinarily high as scientific theories go, close to the level of various physical theories, which is unusual for a science as broad as climatology. Finally, the changes made to the theory, rather than undermining it, enhance it both as a vehicle for future experimental study, and refine in detail the various ways global climate change functions.
Scientific theories are never verified. They are always provisionally accepted, as long as they meet the criteria above for success. When any scientist, using any theoretical model, begins a study, in the back of his or her mind is the idea that it is quite possible the theory being used is not only wrong, but will be proven wrong by the experiment in question. We should be less impressed by the number of studies that confirm the theory of human-induced global climate change, and more impressed by the theory's stability and reliability as a predictor for scientific exploration.
Real skepticism is not sitting around asking questions about Al Gore's electricity consumption; that is character assassination, and is irrelevant anyway. Real skepticism is the work of a variety of scientists, each and every day, doing research and discovering that global climate change is occurring, and that the model stating that human activity, from industry to mowing the lawn, is a major, perhaps the major factor involved.
