With so many people in the United States becoming disillusioned with both major political parties, it is time we took a good look at possible alternatives. Here they are:

The Libertarian Party:

http://www.lp.org/

They already have chosen a Presidental candidate: Bob Barr.

http://www.bobbarr2008.com/home

The Green Party:

http://www.gp.org/index.php

They have not yet chosen a candidate, but they will be having their convention in Chicago, which is ironically the home city of Barack Obama.

http://www.greenparty2008.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

There are two other minor parties that may be considered, though they are considered too extremist by this writer.

The Constitution Party (attacks the Libertarians for not being true to THEIR interpretation of the Constitution):

http://www.constitution-party.net/

America First Party (ultra-nationalist, reminds me of the fascist movements of Europe before World War II):

http://www.americafirstparty.org/

Most global warming denialists I'm familiar with are old people who are set in their ways. Such people are most vulnerable to confirmation bias. Younger adults, on the other hand, are not so attracted or attached to dogma.

I, Dale Husband, along with many others, stand for my chosen causes in Care2 because I beleive in doing what's right, regardless of whether I get paid for it or not. And it's not just global warming either. I have also fought for teaching evolution and to get rid of the Bush regime and anything like it from corrupting America more.

I oppose denialists because they appeal to ingrained prejudices based on what certain people WANT to believe, regardless of the actual facts. The big oil companies, including Exxon, certainly feel threatened by the facts about global warming. The idea that we humans are messing up the Earth with greenhouse gases which will lead to global disaster within a century or two is indeed offensive to people's egos, because it means they and their descendants must make radical changes to their lifestyles to stop the damage THEY THEMSELVES WILL HAVE HELPED CAUSE. So instead, they LOOK for reasons to deny the truth about themselves and what is happening. People who claim to be experts will then put out fallacious claims all over the internet knowing desparate people are out there to grab it and spread it around. They play their victims like an instrument, really. That is the real scam, not what Al Gore and the IPCC do. Uncertainty about the facts is no excuse for denying them. And noting that the effects of global warming can have natural causes is no excuse for denying outright that man plays a role in that phenomenon. Those are logical fallacies and I will oppose, expose and depose them every time I see them, because I WANT THE HUMAN RACE TO SURVIVE INDEFINITLY! And being able to foresee the downfall of humanity (and global warming is but one cause for profound concern here) and not doing anything about it because you let yourself be misled by people that only live for this present reality is the worst form of nonsense I can imagine.

For any conspiracy to succeed, there are several conditions that may be required: 

1. The participants must be as few as possible.
2. The conspiracy must be of as short a duration as possible.
3. The conspiracy must be extremely secretive.

Condition 3 relies on the first two, as indicated in the proverb, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

Thus, the commonly held 9-11 conspiracy theory that many government officials under the Bush Administration were directly involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is far less credible than the idea that a dozen operatives of Al-Qaeda were responsible. Likewise, it is far more credible that Exxon and its operatives have been planting misleading claims about global warming in the popular press and various blogs over the past couple of decades than that thousands of scientists have been misleading people about global warming since 1896, when Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first identified the heat retaining properties of carbon dioxide (called “carbonic acid” in Arrhenius’ paper referred to below).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf

People make up conspiracy theories to explain what could be responsible for something they happen to dislike. The “theory” could be more properly considered a hypothesis in science. The problem comes when these people do not take the next step in the scientific method, which is to test the idea via observation or experiment. Instead, they proclaim the conspiracy theory as DOGMA and proceed to interpret all evidence according to that dogma, despite never finding any direct evidence to confirm the theory. Then they abandon all willingness to allow the claim to be disproven.

You can’t do science that way! Just because a theory explains something doesn’t mean it is true. You must ultimately rule out all other possibilities before stating something questionable to be FACT.

(((Interesting comments, these three.

Let's face it, no one who is not a dissident is going to read links to an HIV dissident site, especially when some of the papers are by Duesberg. People may read papers from mainstream scientists so long as they support their own arguments. Everyone here is interested in furthering their own arguments. Period.
Posted by: wayne | March 19, 2007 7:46 PM

"Not only have I read Duesberg's articles but I have checked his claims with the 'orthodox' literature. It is only after this that I concluded that duesberg is full of crap."
And therefore everyone reading this blog should take Chris Noble's word for it. Just like everyone takes nature's and Science's "word for it" when they also say Duesberg is full of crap. My guess is that (unlike Chris Noble) 99% of people who take [fill in the blank]'s "word for it" have not actually taken time to examine the "dissident literature" (or even the "orthodox literature" which dissidents allegedly "cherry-pick" and "abuse"). My guess is, 99% of people who dismiss dissidents out of hand do so simply because "everyone else thinks so..."
And then everyone wonders why it's NOT impossible for such a blunder to have happened...
Jake
Posted by: Jake | March 24, 2007 6:51 AM

DT said: "I dismiss dissidents because I have taken the trouble to look in detail at their claims, and found them wanting".
DT, as with most of what you have to say, that statement of yours is not true at all!
DT dismisses the HIV dissidents because DT is a HIV drug rep to doctors for a pharmaceutical company! Doooohhhh!
Posted by: lincoln | April 1, 2007 12:06 AM

This is an example of what happens when someone gets so fixated on an idea that they can't stand to lose an argument over it.

Natural selection describes the process by which variations in a population of organisms is edited out over time to enhance the ability of the individual organisms to survive and reproduce in an environment. Even if over 90% of all mutations, being random, are harmful to the next generation, natural selection can still eliminate those and keep those others that are beneficial, thus countering the destructive effects of mutations in general.

It is the same with the scientific peer review process. Because science has made so much progress over the past few centuries, most people have the impression that scientists are unusually brilliant, nearly infallible, and totally objective in their views and methods. But in fact, that is simply not the case for most of them, at least as individuals. Scientists can be just as mistaken, corrupt, dogmatic, and failing in their efforts and assumptions as the rest of humanity. A few of them can even be downright stupid!

If that is true, how can science be trusted to produce reliable facts and theories? Because the scientists use peer review as their means to test any new ideas put on the table by one of their number. No scientist’s word need be taken at face value. In order for his idea to be accepted as anything beyond a speculation, he must show observational or experimental data, clearly defined, that supports it. Thus, it should always be possible for other scientists to duplicate the results of the first scientist making the claim. If attempts to duplicate the observations or experiments do not produce the same result, the idea is rejected.

Sometimes the peer review process goes too far in its skepticism, and a valid idea, such as continental drift, is rejected and even ridiculed by scientists even though it explains all the data collected and is contradicted by none of it. But that’s why repeated testing of that idea is required, as long as it is not outright falsified. Continental drift WAS accepted in the 1960s once an overwhelming amount of evidence was found to support it and those geologists who had been bigoted against it in the 1920s had died or retired, and a new generation had arisen that was more open-minded. Those who supported the continental drift theory were able to come up with a mechanism, plate tectonics, that explained it, and once they did opposition to it faded away rapidly.

Individual scientists may fall so deeply in love with their own ideas that they refuse to accept the peer review process when it rejects their ideas. Then they become cranks who no longer do science, but instead put out propaganda to appeal to the scientifically illiterate. This is especially true of Creationists and global warming denialists who happen to have science degrees. They even go so far as to attack the peer review process itself! But it must be noted that they can never produce anything that would produce superior results in terms of seeking objective data in the universe and explaining it.

Scientists who refuse to recognize that an idea of theirs is wrong are like a population of organisms that are too specialized in their lifestyle to adapt to any sudden change in their environment, resulting in their extinction. Fortunately, the progress of science continues even in spite of such incidents, just as life on Earth has continued despite the mass extinctions that have wiped out most species that evolved in Earth before.