Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility

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No.

If you had posted a link from a centre-right news publication like The Times, that would be fine. If you had even chosen a reputable right one like The Daily Telegraph, that would probably be spun, but not excessively so. Instead, you chose an incredibly partisan website of little or no repute. It would be the equivalent of taking an article from the Bradford Communist Worker's Newsletter, or the website of the Nebraskan Gaia Liberation Front. The important word is "laughably", not "right".

Now of course, partisan publications can produce good journalism, but before you go posting something to support your argument, you should check the credibility of it. This brings this thread in rather a nice circle...

Or they have scientifically valid criticisms of the current climate models and politics has nothing to do with it.

ruveyn

That doesn't explain the correlation with conservatism though. If it is purely down to scientific expertise then you would expect all political orientations to be represented equally across climate change deniers. In reality, they are disproportionately likely to be conservative.

Which of these is most likely:

1) Believing that regulation is bad causes you to downplay the negative effects of a lack of regulation
2) Belief that the climate is not changing causes you to believe that taxes should be low/government should be small/businesses should not be regulated*
3) Chance (the data is not available, but I imagine the probability of it being due to chance is less than 5% or they would not have published)

* I am assuming fiscal conservatism. If you can think why a belief that the climate is not changing might lead to anti-abortion views, or anti-gay views, or some such, then please educate me.

A large factor in the severity of that meltdown was a known and acknowledged design flaw. It was designed to produce electricity as well as rapidly produce weapons grade plutonium. The unfortunate side effect is a positive coefficient for reactivity, which basically means as the temperature goes up, the reactivity rate goes up, which causes the temperature to go up, and on and on until supercriticality (although this can happen in less than a second). Part of the problem was the pressure to keep up with the US in the Cold War arms race mentality of mutually assured destruction.

The US has so many restrictions, regulations, and minimum requirements for safeguards, backup systems, and interlocks that the possibility of a reactor going supercritical is almost zero. Even if it does go supercritical, the NRC requirements make it so that automatic containment systems kick in. These requirements make it expensive and time consuming to build a nuclear reactor and are also the reason that nuclear power does not provide electricity "too cheap to meter."