Jim Manzi explains why, even though he’s skeptical of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, etc. he insists on telling people that global warming is real:

Earlier in the post you said of the global warming debate that you “haven’t taken the time to study it”. Later in the post you say that “If the issue is truly important enough, the experts will sort that out themselves”. But unless you want to do your own armchair climate science, which I think would be a real mistake, the practical questions become who we identify as the experts, and what process do we require for them to “sort it out”.

When it comes to specific technical questions, the experts that I identify are those who have spent years studying the relevant topic areas at recognized universities and research centers, have published peer-reviewed technical articles, and can point to specific scientific results. The narrow process that I support for “sorting it out” is the scientific method, requiring replicated research, peer-review, falsification testing of claims and so forth. The broader process that sits around this must include some NRC-like entity, as I described in my prior post, that has leading scientific experts from other fields to do another layer of review to minimize groupthink and self-dealing. This method, like all others, is imperfect and takes time to work, but is superior to any practical alternative, and has worked out pretty well for America and the Western world across many, many such questions for a long time.

[snip]

If we end up opposing many of the same policies, why, then, don’t I just quiet down? There are two ways to answer that.

The first is that we all have our jobs to do. The job of a writer is to do his best to write things that he believes to be correct. This has been my motivation (as far as it is possible to know my own mind) in writing what I have on the topic.