In most places outside the US, science isn't accepted as something that can be so casually threatened by special interests working against all objectively observable sources of information.
I've been following the wider skeptical movement here in the US for a while now. Perhaps earlier on (over a decade ago), challenges to the scientific consensus on things like global warming had some legitimacy as a real movement - but by now, it really is just a shill movement. Every existing doubt remaining is NOT in terms of the science being wrong, but rather which implication of the science is most correct. Yes, you can always find a theory or person willing to speculate in any direction you want - but nothing that still constitutes a challenge to the science of global warming anymore. It's observed from space, observed from dozens of major lines of evidence, observed from all known history we can trace, observed from watching other planets, and passes every known line of meta-analysis that uses an actual scientific process.
It's only here in the US (or perhaps OPEC nations) that none of that really ends up mattering to what a person at random gets to hear. Don't get me wrong - nowhere is science really reported without a million biases, just the same as no scientist or agency perfect - but we really do distort our science reporting with a huge amount of false controversy. It's just painful to see how much of that twisted interpretation of so much science so heavily represented in so many of these slashdot stories.
And so often,l it's from the libertarian side, which also weirds me out - again, I come in as a close follower of the skeptical movement (got a JREF card in my wallet), which is filled to the brim with libertarian ideals. It weirds me out, because in order to have a meaningfully free society, it seems absurd that the overwhelming push is to close off so much from objective observable truth, and to use the constant barrage of logical fallacies so rampant in the global warming denial popularizers toolset.
Honestly, just follow more lines of evidence, in just about any direction you want - the pattern of global warming, and it's predictable (if chaotic at some scales) effects are as much a science as anything I've seen. The studies themselves come from all sorts of people - but they all get to the same places in wonderfully surprising ways, and the overall picture is rather resilient by this point. Skepticism should mean looking for truth, eliminating where we're lying to ourselves, and at this point, the only folks consistently lying have been the folks in steadfast and unobserving denial.
Ryan Fenton