Back when I had a bit of a contrarian streak I considered myself a 'climate skeptic'. In particular, I followed the blog Climate Audit as best as I could given my lack of experience with climatology. They have a wonderful David and Goliath-esque story of a citizen scientist double-checking the work of world famous climate scientists and finding fault. It's not hard to see why people would be attracted to a story such as that, especially when skeptics make some reasonable critiques and points. Things such as problems with individual surface stations which are poorly located and a lack of transparency in the data used by climate scientists; reasonable, quantifiable, solvable critiques focused on the betterment of science.

I fell out of like with these skeptics, however, when they started to focus more on controversy and conspiracy. It's still interesting to see the response to th8ings such as the recent sea ice record but it's increasingly looking like they're grasping at straws. I'm sure as the years go on and we see more and more evidence of climate change they find ways to explain things away: the sun, bad proxies, vast worldwide conspiracy, etc.