Tipler and crackpottery

The Varieties of Crackpot Experience | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Oh dear. My favourite physicist Frank Tipler has come out as a global warming sceptic. (Well, just remember I don't pin the need for CO2 reductions on global warming anyway.)

This post about him is not very fair, but it's by Sean Carroll, a physicist who (despite his group blog moving to Discover magazine) keeps bringing up politics, religion and gay rights in a typical leftie atheist scientist fashion in a blog that is ostensibly about science and physics. The paraphrase of Tipler's comments on global warming make his comments sound much worse than they are.

Still, part of the reason I like Tipler is because it is never 100% clear whether (or at what point) he has truly fallen into crackpottery. (He also answered a couple of my emails years ago.) Certainly, it would seem he was stretching the credibility way too thin with his last book in which the miracles of Christ were given quasi-scientific explanation. He gets up atheist's noses by talking about the Omega Point God as a scientific fact.

Still, I suspect that his science work is more important than is usually acknowledged.

But there is no reason in particular to expect that a moderately famous physicist who has made his name in work on relativity and cosmology should have any special expertise in atmospheric physics and climate studies, so I don't think anyone skeptic should be too heartened by his views.

Maybe I should email him with some of the anti-Skeptic blogs that are around...