Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Real Climate Change Skeptics

Image from Roberto_Rizzato
"I can't hear you over the weight of scientific consensus!"
Climate Change is one of the issues that, despite conservative media claims, is pretty well established. Much of it is human made. And the human made portion is having a clear negative impact on humanity. The world is less hospitable to us.

It's an undeniable consensus now.

And if we find a trail of evidence that leads another way, I'll be surprised, and scientists are ready to hear about it. But like in dealings with religious apologist and Creationist, there is NO new data against human made Climate Change to consider.

Galling in this issue, are people opposed to accepting the impact Climate Change. They call themselves skeptics often. They are skeptics in much the same way as guys who call themselves demonologists and skeptics, or antivaxxers and skeptics. (And, yes, we have seen some famous people who call themselves skeptics who mocked the idea of Climate Change. And they deserve to be criticized for the bad analysis.)




Anyway, on the last Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, looked at the ridiculous debates on Climate Change that the media still engages in. Both sides aren't equal.





And if the business and ideological interests pushing obliviousness isn't bad enough, we get the political short term self interest.

Chris Hayes looked at this on his show:




Ideologues, dirty industry, and self serving politicians are doing no one any favors these days. They are succeeding in delaying any forward movement. And we are running low on time.

We have a pendulum of acceptance on this issue. Maybe more conservatives will accept the science and dangers we face soon. But many of them did already, in the 1990's. It's shifted poorly over this decade. The coal and oil industry will pay nicely to not believe this stuff. And ideologues, industry, and politicians make an insidious trinity. They've made science, environment, and green dirty words.

These aren't serious skeptics. They are opportunists.


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