Global warming skeptics increase ranks in wake of IPCC reports

Instead, Nordhaus chalked up declining support to economic pressures.

“The declines in acceptance of climate science among Americans predate the current controversy and probably have a lot more to do with economic fears and the rising unpopularity of cap and trade than with any close reading that most Americans are doing of climate science.”

Nordhaus even points to radical environmentalists as one possible influence behind waning public for support for climate change science. “A lot of the craziness about the science has actually come from greens attempting tar anyone who questions cap and trade or similar regulatory strategies to mandate reductions of emissions as anti-science deniers. But there are many reasons to question those policies that have nothing to do with one’s assessment of climate science.”

Regardless of where someone on stands on an issue, “the Holocaust denier charges are not helpful,” Nordhaus said. “There’s a pretty big qualitative difference between asserting that 6 million Jews were not exterminated in the Holocaust and saying that you don’t think CO2 causes global temperatures to increase.”

Meyer agrees. “I obviously have a point of view,” he told The Daily Caller, “but I just want to be able to debate the science without being lumped in with Holocaust and evolution deniers or subject to, as Joe Kennedy once called for, climate Nuremberg trials.”