Global Warming Skeptic Changes MInd

Michael Shermer writes a column called The Skeptic in Scientific American. He's skeptical about all kinds of things and that can be healthy at times, if not overdone, but I was surprised to read that he was skeptical about global warming, until he met Al Gore:

My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement. Activists who vandalize Hummer dealerships and destroy logging equipment are criminal ecoterrorists. Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I learned (and believed) that by the 1990s overpopulation would lead to worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of key minerals, metals and oil, predictions that failed utterly. Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians--the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon--issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for "national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions" in carbon emissions.

Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.

I'm glad Shermer has come around; and I thought it was interesting that '86 leading evangelical Christians' caught his attention. I enjoy reading Shermer's columns, though I admit I've been tempted once or twice to send him a note reminding him that, after all, Christians created modern science in the first place; Kepler, Newton and even Galileo took their religion seriously and did not think that religion and science are incompatible. In fact, most religions of the world do not think religion and science are incompatible.