Taking the endlessly fraught subject of global warming politics, I’ve come to realize that there’s the mirror image of the denier. While deniers dismiss man made global warming for reasons unconnected to the scientific evidence (though those reasons still have considerable merit), believers accept global warming without reference to the scientific evidence and affirm every line of bunk that is put forward under the name of global warming. Anyone who thinks An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically legit would be one example. Another would by my current bete noir David Brin. About the subject of global warming he writes:
To be clear, the unequivocal position by the U.S. military has had some effects upon the Fox party line. Facts like Russian bases erupting along the Arctic Ocean and the opening of the Northwest Passage to summer shipping are pretty undeniable… so Hannity and company have veered to changing the message: “All right, the climate is changing… but… but… climate has ALWAYS been changing and that don’t mean we gotta do anything!”
In fact, that’s a lie, top to bottom. The last 6000 years has been among the most stable, climate-wise, in the last 20 million… and even so, small perturbations like the 1500s Little Ice Age wrought horrible havoc on nations and peoples. Any astrophysicist will show you how closely Earth skates along the inner edge of our sun’s “goldilocks” or habitable zone… and hence why we can afford only traces of greenhouse gas.
Ahem:
I suppose that you could say that it is ‘less variable’ compared with twenty million years, but here’s the ickle problem: proxies spanning 20,000,000 years have necessarily lower resolution than ones spanning 6,000 years. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find any references supporting Brin’s claim.
Brin also describes how climate change wiped out the Assyrian civilization, but I’d note that this claim of climate change induced collapse is an old one that is receiving more and more criticism these days.
This is the dialogue of the deaf. Because the believers think they have “Science!” on their side, they endorse all sorts of nonsense. And the deniers are so fixated with the obvious bunk that they throw out the real science along with it.
