From a few years back, Are climate sceptics the real champions of the scientific method? As part of our series on science and the green movement, Warren Pearce looks at how science is used by their opponents

While this may mark a new era of extended and unforgiving online peer review, is it also a convenient modus operandi for politically motivated sceptics who can utilise doubt as a weapon against effective implementation of climate policy. Those who favour free market policies over regulation certainly have ample motivation to chip away at climate science if they think it will cast aspersions on the basis for policy. However, how can criticisms of sceptics as politically motivated be squared with science's commitment to findings always being provisional and open to challenge? At what point can we judge that a scientific question moves from a position of "doubt" to being "settled"?

"The conundrum is that both "sides" (if one can use that term) seem to focus on real science as the arbiter of knowledge claims. In doing so, they risk constricting material policy measures, issues of wider public significance than scientific debates about climate change."

Social issues such as the disparity in access to food, income, the wise use of resources, those are the things that have to inform the regulations and negotiations to deal with climate change. That's hard enough to do when the science is spot on and proves the effects of mineral extraction, pollution from manufacturing and the internal combustion engine. The deniers have a stake in keeping poor people poor and letting the marketplace pollute and keep the rich getting richer.