Year 4, Month 1, Day 17: Turn Off All Thought, Surrender To The Void

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson weighs in on climate change, with an excellent column titled “Hot Enough For You?”:

All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?

Apparently not. The climate-change denialists — especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course — have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.

The thing is, though, that climate change has already put itself on the agenda — not the cause, but the effects. We’re dealing with human-induced warming of the atmosphere. It’s just that we’re doing so in a manner that is reactive, expensive and ultimately ineffectual.

A slap at George Will in my second paragraph. Ha ha ha ha. Sent January 11:

Climate change denialists have always had lots of excuses and diversionary tactics available for use in the face of Mother Nature’s stubbornness. The climate’s not changing — but if it is, it’s not dangerous — but if it is, humans aren’t responsible — but if they are, it’s too expensive to do anything — but if it’s more expensive to do nothing…well, repeat ad nauseum. Enabled by a complaisant media, anti-science politicians dance attendance on the fossil-fuel establishment, whose profits might be infinitesimally reduced if we took steps to address the accelerating greenhouse effect before it spins catastrophically out of control.

Whether they’re scientifically-ignorant tea-partiers or bow-tied faux-intellectuals, denialists have this in common: no amount of evidence or logic can shake their faith. In this respect, they’re like the NRA: enablers and excusers of a destructive technology, and avatars of ignorance at a time when our society desperately needs wisdom.

Warren Senders