Dr. Michael Shermer, organizer of the Skeptics Society "Environmental Wars" conference opens the proceedings noting (coincidentally?) that the conference is being held on what looks to be the warmest day of the year in Pasadena thus far. We really need skepticism about nature – and especially in southern California, he explains.

Shermer is the "skeptic" columnist for Scientific American. In a recent column, "The Flipping Point," he declared he is no longer skeptical about the threat of anthropogenic global warming, announcing "it is time to flip from skepticism to activism." Perhaps appropriately, he begins the conference with a trailer for Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Shermer notes he used to hear similar things about global cooling in the 1970s, but he'd never focused on environmental issues.

Fast-forward a few decades, Shermer ran a debate over Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, despite warnings from environmentalist activists not to legitimize the book. Since then, Shermer started to pay attention to environmental matters, particularly in the last year. One thing that particularly caught his eye was the "evangelical call to action" because this was the "last group" he expected to endorse environmental causes. Then seeing the Gore slide show upon which the movie is based, and reading multiple books on the subject (especially Tim Flannnery's The Weather Makers). The end result was the column announcing his newfound belief in the threat of anthropogenic global warming.

The flipping point column provoked a torrent of e-mail criticism from both sides – from fellow skeptics for abandoning his "skepticism" and from believers for coming late to the party. Today's conference, Shermer notes, will investigate many of the claims that caused his conversion.