How can there even be climate change skeptics?

There's been a mild kerfuffle in the climate change interested blogosphere due to retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon's statements on serial Climate Fraudster James Hansen and NASA's climate models.

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,”

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

etc etc

Now, if you are one of those promoting the whole climate change scam then the onus is on you to definitively prove your position.

"Assertions without proof can be dismissed without proof" - Christopher Hitchens.

With each passing day the climate change scam is being revealed for all to see and, critically, the so called evidence is crumbling faster than the Larsen Ice Shelf isn't.

For climate change to be something worth spending trillions of dollars of the world's formerly strong economy on three conditions must be proven (not theorised):

1) temperatures are rising;
2) the rise is caused primarily by man made CO2 emissions; and
3) the consequences for the planet will be catastrophic.

Nearly everyone accepts 1) but 2) and 3) are far from proven. Luckily for Climate Astrologers at NASA and elsewhere else that the Democrats have porked up the non-stimulus bill with hundreds of millions of dollars for climate models so they can be back-fitted and tweaked into proving exactly what politicians, envirofascists and financial industry players who'll make millions from trading carbon credits want to see.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point is this.

How can John Theon, a well regarded atmospheric scientist, not believe in global warming?

How is it that highly, highly qualified scientists (with higher academic qualifications than most of the Hokey Stick team, for example) do not believe in catastrophic global warming?

How is it that Roy Spencer is a skeptic?

Or Bob Carter?

Or Tim Ball?

Or John Christy?

If 'the science is settled' and the proof is so definitive then how does it come about that people such as Christy who have been involved in the collection of climate data via satellites do not believe that there's a problems?

If a spokesman for the Climate Industry would like to let me know how that's possible then I'd be most appreciative.

(Nothing Follows)