Possible explanation for why geologists are often climate skeptics?

Well, for one thing, the companies most likely to employ a geologist are in the mining or fossil fuel extraction industries. These phony "skeptics" are usually nothing of the sort. They either ethically-challenged sock puppets for an industry lobby-funded disinformation campaign who are trading their scientific credentials for cash, or at the very least ideologues defending their career work in fossil fuels or their rabid faith in the "free market" libertarianism of Ayn Rand.

And online, they are more often than not an astroturfer. Here's an interesting tidbit about American Majority, a Tea Party "grassroots organization that does some media training in dishonest online tactics for its operatives. "In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet." This is from Guardian columnist George Monbiot, which you can read here: http://www.monbiot.com/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/

The argument that somehow scientists are proving GW and CC true only because it is somehow in their best interest financially, and that since "billions" of government dollars goes toward scientists as opposed to much less going into lobbying from right wing "think tanks" there is motivation to falsify data.  Thus the corporations are just trying to show everyone what the real truth is...well, anyway, this seems to be very popular with the deniers these days and it drives me crazy.

Here is the real argument:

- On the one hand we have corporations with billions upon billions of dollars pumped into oil, has, and mining infrastructure like refineries, pipelines, etc. - fixed costs that are very much sunk.  They also have billions of profits each year from these industries, and here in the US they get billions of dollars in subsidies from the government.

- On the other hand we have scientists who if the GW and CC money did dry up would be able to move on to other projects - at least the vast majority of them.  The trend as far as what the government spends on science moves independently of whether GW is proven to exist or not, so they will have a job and income no matter what.

So, who has more money to spend and more at stake?? 

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Climate Change Journal

Conservative Psychology

Climat changes every thousands years and its normal