Religion is off the hook in this post. At the moment, my greatest frustration is with skeptics—global warming “skeptics.”
Many conservative commentators have giddily pronounced the death of global warming after the recent string of snowstorms (“snowmaggedon” or “snowpocalypse”). Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, argued “the most severe winter storm in years” would “seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.” This sentiment has opened the floodgates for all sorts of crazy. The Utah legislature recently gave global warming science a vote of no confidence. Donald Trump called for Al Gore’s Nobel Prize to be stripped away. And Glenn Beck expressed regret that climatologists haven’t committed suicide en masse over their alleged failures.
Look, an episodic snowstorm does not undermine the theory of climate change in the slightest. In fact, it’s perfectly consistent with and predicted by global warming models. Plus, there is a reason it’s called global warming. You can’t assess climate trends by looking out your window on any given day. What climatologists do instead is track the mean global temperature over time. Myopically focusing on a snowstorm, then, hides the fact that the past decade was the warmest on record and that this is among the warmest winters.
None of this is to say that there can’t be doubts about global warming. The Climategate fiasco reminds us that scientists are human—despite their occasional pretensions to objectivity. But at the very least, here’s what we do (0r should) know about climate change:
1. The world is warming.
2. Humans almost certainly play an integral role in its warming.
3. There is vast scientific consensus behind 1 and 2.
Legitimate questions can be raised about how much warming is occurring and how much exactly we’re contributing. How we should respond to climate change (if at all) should also be up for debate. I for one don’t think that climate change is an existential threat to our species and that draconian international protocols are the only recourse. So don’t lump me together with the shrillest doomsayers. I just ask that you spare me regurgitated Glenn Beck talking points.
If, like me, you know a lot of ill-informed global warming deniers, these resources will help you debunk their arguments:
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Mentioned in the same paragraph as Phil Plait? SHAFT is coming up in the world!
Denier-people in this thread, read this.
Or at least coming up in the internet.
Read a book. …jwallen