I don't think he recanted his position, rather he's just decided to keep his beliefs more to himself. The latest I can find from him is in his 2016 book Presto!: "The truth is that Penn & Teller were never climate change deniers. We just didn't know. Since then, peer pressure and kowtowing to authority have shut us the fuck up. We drive electric cars. I can also try to placate the climate people by calling myself a vegan. Eating onions imported from Mexico leaves a smaller carbon footprint than eating local chickens." https://books.google.com/books?id=nVGmCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA240&lpg=...

Personally, I think I agree with Penn. I believe the world is warming, some significant portion of it is anthropogenic, but that many of the "received truths" of popular climate science are based on weak science and overstated evidence. Most of the conclusions will stand, but more will fall than the published error bars would indicate. I think it's a problem that one is not allowed to genuinely say "I don't know" when asked what one thinks about any scientific issue. Whether or not the current conclusions are true, it leads in a dangerous direction when people are shunned for stating their ignorance rather than proclaiming their faith in something they do not actually believe.

If anything he was calling out those manipulating "green" for their own agendas -- and people "connecting" to river rocks.

The bullshit is the lack of consistency. Which one is to be feared: Warming? Cooling? Change? ... Hard to argue change ... What if we can't do anything about it? Are you truly sure the cause is CO2 or is CO2 just an indicator of a warming event?

Gore is a politician and charlatan. [1] Like many attached to the movement, a hypocrite and profiting without any realistic solutions that won't detriment the ecosystem, economy or quality of life in any other manner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore#Criticism

Like, say they were doing a show on the big bang. That's a pretty non-controversial thing, but we obviously don't know what happened back then. Still, we sure don't see a whole lot of big bang skeptics around (and probably a lot of us here would think they were being willfully ignorant or coy to say "well, I don't know, I wasn't there"). Big bang skepticism isn't an unofficial part of a major political party, either. What's the difference here, I wonder.

Isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right

The only really valid criticism there seem to be that he flies around in a private jet, which seem pretty contrary to his beliefs. Who cares that he advocates for "green" policies that he'd stand to benefit from? If he truly believes in these initiatives, why would he invest in them himself? Do you question SV investors who advocate for better stem education or net neutrality?

That "97%" claim is questionable.

The usual source on that number is this paper from 2009:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/epdf

A bunch of earth scientists were asked to take a web-based survey with a couple questions about climate. There was about a 30% response rate. Survey question #2 was:

"Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures"?

82% of survey participants answered yes to that question. Which, sure, sounds like a consensus, but it's not a rhetorically convincing level of consensus, so the researchers apparently kept slicing up the data until they could find something better-sounding.

The salami slice that fit the bill turned out to be (quoting a Fig. 1 chart caption): "Climatologists who are active publishers on climate change", which is to say, folks who had multiple recent publications in climate journals and "more than 50% of their publications in the last 5 years had been on the subject of climate change."

So basically the finding says among people who are able to get lots of papers published on climate change, THOSE guys share 97% agreement on the "humans are causing it" question.

Out of 3146 scientists who responded, 77 were counted as "Climatologists who are active publishers on climate change". 75 out of those 77 answered "yes" to question 2, hence 97.1% agreement.

But they also broke out just self-identified "climatologists". Eyeballing the chart, it looks to me like they have about 87% agreement on Question #2.

TL;DR: Roughly 87% - not 97+% - of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. (Or at least, did so as of 2009).

Additionally, John Cook - the guy who runs skepticalscience - did some studies claiming to find high agreement with "the consensus" among published papers about climate. But his paper were terrible, didn't show what he claimed they did, and were less relevant to your claim.

Here's a blogpost going into some issues with the Cook studies and the claims made for them:

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseho...

The difference between disagreeing with 80%-ish and 97% is largely of rhetorical importance. For propaganda purposes it feels like the difference between "a respectable minority view" and "a lunatic fringe". Alas, scientists almost never agree on ANYTHING to the 97% level. So if you hear that level claimed, the best bet is that somebody either fudged with the question - watering it down to such a degree that all the "skeptics" also agree - or fudged with the sample pool, making the surveyed group so tiny and self-selected as to exclude lots of legitimate scientists in related fields.

Part of the IPCC "consensus view" on climate is the notion that human activity is responsible for more than half of recent warming. Thus it's quite possible - even likely - for someone to be skeptical of the consensus view and still answer "yes" to question 2.

If question 2 were made more precise such that only people who agree with the consensus would answer yes, the level of agreement found - even among climatologists - would be much smaller even than 87%. (I'm guessing closer to 60%. Still probably a majority view in the field, still a "consensus", just not an overwhelming consensus.)

I'm an atheist too, but its counterproductive to spend all of your time telling people how stupid they are.

I would pay some money to see him, Ben Stein, Michael Moore, and Bill Maher and Ann Coulter all in the same room together.

Penn and Teller are a lot of fun and put on a great show. The political issue they spend the most time on is the TSA.