I’ll go even further than that, and declare that for at least twenty years I have not seen any evidence on these boards that Sam_Stone is an actual denier or anti-science “skeptic” regarding the essential facts of climate change. Here, for example, is an observation that he posted back in November 2003:
That was perhaps a somewhat optimistic but not in any way denialist or irrational opinion to hold about anthropogenic climate change twenty years ago. And IMHO it doesn’t qualify as denialist or anti-science even now, although its level of optimism probably wouldn’t be considered justifiable nowadays.
What I object to in many of Sam’s climate-science posts, as I explained in the post GIGObuster linked to above, is not a refusal to acknowledge the basic reality of climate-science findings, but rather his inadequately supported disparagement of certain scientific viewpoints just because they ping his personal “liberal ideology” meter.
It’s not in any way “smearing” Sam to complain when he tries to present speculative anti-liberal wish-fulfillment as an honest methodological critique.