Well, there are powerful interest groups who would love us to think of it as a non-issue. What we see here might be the next line of defence, going from "CC is not real" to "Ok, it's real, but not as bad as we're being told".
This is literally what's happening, here's the same author in 2006(!) talking about how he was funded by Exxon, and wrongly denied climate change was happening, but those two things are totally unrelated. After all, why would Exxon still keep giving money to someone who admitted climate change was happening? (answer, because after initially denying it completely, they've spent the last two decades downplaying it and attacking a bunch of other threats to fossil fuel sales)
