Thanks, that helps.

So when you said "There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and funded by these well-funded and completely unscientific propaganda campaigns.", are you claiming that everybody who is a skeptic is getting their info from Amy Moritz Ridenour or some similar person?

My guess is that you're defining "the global warming skeptic movement" in a limited and essentially circular way. You're defining anybody who comes by their AGW skepticism independently or as a result of reading scientific papers or thinking things through from first principles or following the blog debates...as not part of the "movement".

As one contrary data point, I consider myself a skeptic, have followed the AGW issue for at least a decade, and I'd never heard of Amy Moritz Ridenour or - so far as I know - been influenced by her. People I have been influenced by include Steve McIntyre, Craig Loehle, all the IPCC reports, Richard Feynman, Michael Crichton, and the whole gang at RealClimate (both positively and negatively). I do tend to assume politicians are going to (a) tend to be morons, (b) tend to get their talking points from PR firms and think tanks. So if you just look at what Republican lawmakers say you might have a point. But AGW skepticism as a whole is something that has been independently invented by a great many people, including scientists who publish papers and get in debates and even get involved with the IPCC. Including people who aren't republicans.

One can surely explain some AGW skepticism as the result of astroturf organizations that fear carbon taxes, just as one can explain on the other side some AGW boosterism as the result of groups that expect to profit from Carbon Trading markets. But to explain all of it that way misses the mark. People believe what they believe based on what they know and have seen. AGW boosters and AGW skeptics tend to have different priors. They had different values going in, which flavored how they perceived the case being made by the two sides.

Some AGW skepticism is organic and perfectly reasonable, given the information available to the people involved at the time. There are lots of conflicting theories one could point at to explain the same data; some of these theories have been published in peer-reviewed literature and haven't been well-addressed.

I don't care to defend Ridenour, because I don't know her and even if she were squeaky-clean, I'm sure you can find somebody who is what you say she is. But being able to find one example of somebody in a movement who makes mistake X is different from saying that everybody in that movement makes mistake X. I think the burden of proof is still on you to support that your claims weren't ridiculously overbroad.

UPDATE: Some people become skeptics when they see alarmists engaging in shenanigans that go beyond the science or deliberately downplaying uncertainty in the science, and always doing so in the same direction. For one such instance, consider Chris Landsea's resignation letter. Was it, in your view, unjustified? Is it unreasonable for someone who has read Landsea's letter to thereafter take IPCC conclusions with a grain of salt? ( http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/La... )