Because denying evolution is the fundamental basis for evolution isn’t enough for some, it seems the climate change denialists are ramping up to an all out war.
Now, I’m not talking about such violent wars as the “war on Christmas” or “militant atheism,” but an actual, increasingly illegal and violent effort to attack, discredit and threaten real scientists.
The first big break the villains had was their release of hacked emails from the Climate Research Group of East Anglia University. Ignore the fact that these emails contain little more than the honest concerns and relays of human beings, it gave denialists the belief that they’d uncovered the TruthTM what they’d always known – that anthropogenic climate change is an international plot to make Al Gore the supreme leader of a new Communist dictatorship.
These denialists come in every form, some are ardent atheists that I share some common ground, others are Christian. Almost all tend to also believe in lazy-fairy capitalism though.
On a Facebook post about how Canada could actually be doing something to save the environment right now had the coalition actually achieved government a year ago I got these gems:
how is it possible to NOT be skeptical over climate change when it has recently become apparent that there is no pure science on this? The data have been manipulated and in some cases, completely fabricated. The "scientists" conducting these studies do not do so in the interest of gaining knowledge, but because they have an agenda.
I’m not saying that it’s all bullshit, but I am saying that it is irresponsible of the government to act on bad information, especially when doing so will cost taxpayers a metric shitload of money, and some people their jobs. [emphasis added]
I don’t believe in global warming with the data available at the moment and neither do most people. Thats why its been changed to "climate change". Ian, as a scientist or soon to be one, you should be appalled over the disgrace that has fallen over some of the scientific community. This is a disgrace to the "peer-reviewed" procedure. After all, what’s the point if your peer holds the same political and cultural agenda and is willing to cross scientific barriers to see it through.[Refuting links added]
If the emails really discredit all science accumulated over the past thirty years on climate change, then show me how and where they say that. Otherwise shut the fuck up.
But I guess stealing emails wasn’t enough.
Now, the University of Victoria is being broken into and sketchy “technicians” are wandering the halls at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. These are actual criminal acts.
I like this comparison of the increasing violence:
Unless we’re prepared to rewrite history so that the real villains of Watergate were the Democrats for having a hotel room worth breaking into.
I’m really worried about this conflict though.
In the evolution vs. creationism conflict, you have overwhelming evidence dogmatic ignorance.
In this debate though, you have overwhelming evidence, except now the dogmatic ignorance has big oil funding behind it.
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You are a complete idiot. You need medication.
*sigh*
There are many things to say on this, and in most of them, Ian speaks for me, but I’d like to add just one illustration of why the denialist position is self-defeating.
Whenever people mention the shift from “global warming” to “climate change” as a recent example of the Liberal Media Covering Its Tracks or something, they shoot themselves in the foot.
For instance, the IPCC was founded in 1988 (before the major political arguments on this began) – take a guess as to what the “CC” stands for. You can’t recently change to a term that’s been in use for 30 years.
Secondly, one needs only read the Luntz Memo to see that it was the anti-science crowd who advocated a shift to the term “climate change” for political reasons, and they did it in 2001. (Page 12 of the PDF.)
Despite this, the schmuck you quoted still acts as if he was right.
(Btw, Ian, Dr. Weaver was on campus the other day and delivered an excellent talk based loosely on his book, which I highly recommend. Afterwards, we got involved in an interesting discussion on the funding sources of these anti-science groups, and he informed me that pre-Kyoto, the libertarians actually accepted the science, and were trying to debate policy. Kyoto apparently led to them shifting to antiscience. I haven’t verified this claim yet, nor do I have an explanation as to why, but it’s definitely something I’ll look into.)