Point(s) taken, OGM and no hard feelings . Mea culpa! But I don't mean to be dismissive. I wouldn't join in these threads if I had dismissed the issues or the people involved (all of us). I apologise for 'frightened' and 'tizwaz', especially tizwaz. I have genuinely felt that some people are frightened about the future of the planet though. The words were not meant to be dismissive but I realise now that they could seem so.
By dishonest devices, I mean things that have come out in news stories about adjustments to temperature, readings taken from limited sites, the claim that polar bear numbers were falling when in fact they're steady, stories suggesting that there are more (or more severe) hurricanes/floods/droughts, etc "because of climate change" when there is no evidence for this and there is, in fact, evidence to the contrary in some cases — I'm thinking of hurricanes and severe storms in particular. The number of severe hurricanes has gone down in the last century, not up. Damage to human property may have gone up but that's because there is more human property in places where the hurricanes tend to hit land, not because the hurricanes are worse. And so on. That kind of misleading reporting strikes me as dishonest and it's this dishonesty that makes me sceptical. I don't trust the IPCC or the mainstream media to tell me the truth.