Discussion for article #235695
Anybody who speaks or writes on the topic of climate change denialism needs to remember that there are a few orders of denial:
First Order Denialism: Global climate change (GCC) is not happening. These folks are actually pretty fringe at this point - Sen. Inhofe is a first order denier. Folks who complain about “doctored data” or show very short-term trend charts to “disprove” warming are in this group.
Second Order: GCC is happening, but completely natural. These are your “climate has always changed and will always change” folks; they accept GCC but think humans play almost no part in it. They may accept that carbon dioxide is a component, but claim that it’s really water vapor, or volcanoes, or sunspots or some bullshit like that.
Third Order: GCC is happening, humans contribute, but OMG Y U DESTROY OUR LIFESTYLE! These people usually build a nice strawman about how Algore wants to take everybody’s SUVs away and tax us all into poverty to build solar farms and bird-killing windmills.
IMO, we need to address Second and Third Order denialism, and to do that we need to specifically mention “human-caused” climate change. It’s not enough to say that “denial of climate change” is being attacked as stupid - we need to see progress in the attacks/ridicule leveraged against the natural-cycle/sunspot/lack of pirates people.
So when Sec. Moniz says, “major companies are arguing more and more that climate change is a reality”, that’s nice and all, but only fringe whackos like Inhofe deny GCC. When major companies start arguing, “these specific human behaviors are contributing to GCC and those behaviors must be reduced, modified, or eliminated,” then we’ll really be getting somewhere.
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When GCCdenial causes rivers of money to dry up THEN the DumbALECs might get the message.
What we are seeing is panic on the left as fewer people are buying this stuff. Is the climate changing? Off course it is. It has always changed since there has been a climate, several billion years ago. Are WE affecting it? Much different question. Absolutely nothing is changing in a way that has not happened in the past. Danish government photos from the 30s show glaciers retreating further then than they are now. A thousand years ago Vikings were farming on the south coast of Greenland. About 20,000 years ago there were glaciers in southern Ohio, and the Great Lakes did not exist. Three million years ago there was no Antarctic Ice cap. Rock strata chemistry indicates there was 10 times as much CO2 in the air as now. The claim that we are affecting the world by fluctuations of the level of a trace gas is laughable, except when politicians use it to deceive and subjugate.