What's becoming clear, I think, as time goes by, is that climate denialism has not just lost the science -- obviously -- but can't compete on the moral plane, either.
You might, if you were a thoughtful person in command of the science and the facts, be able to make a moral argument that the world's best future requires a smooth and slow transition from fossil fuels to a noncarbon economy. It would, of course, mean acknowledging the science of AGW, and the consequences, but arguing intelligently and compassionatley that the poor, particularly, deserve fossil fuels to reach a potential of something the West's, and that the world will need to adapt -- intelligently but at cost and at an unavoidable loss -- towards such a future.
Maybe that's wrong, maybe it's not. But a thinking and caring person could think hard about it.
But what seems ever more apparent is that none of the climate deniers are capable of thinking on that level. It's just not in their makeup.
And I think this has never been more apparent than with the ugliness that's appeared in the last 24 hours since the massacres in Paris.
Decent people have the courtesy to let the blood dry on the street before their political attacks. Decent people.
But climate denialists are proving, again, they simply are not decent people.
The first one I noticed was Joe Bastardi, who,
as we've seen, is not the brightest bulb on the tree. Big Big Joe couldn't wait to exploit this horrendous tragedy -- remember, France's population is about 65 million, so the equivalent scale of 128 dead would be an unthinkable 630 deaths in the U.S. -- for his own particular purposes:
As if this wasn't bad enough. Bastardi kept going:
Of course, Marc Morano had to spray his scent around:
Frank Bruni at the
New York Times found this offensive piece by Roger J. Simon:
Well, apparently President Obama’s justly profound concern about rising temperatures is proof of his inadequate attention to terrorism and an indictment of his ability to do triage overall.
Or so I gather from a column written by Roger L. Simon for PJ Media. Simon characterized Obama as “a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror.”
Does battling the latter prohibit battling the former?
Besides the basic lack of respect for the dead and injured, and those grieving and afraid in Paris, all these people seemed to forget that the August 2003 heat wave in France left
15,000 dead there, and
70,000 in Europe,
perhaps 80,000.
Those deaths didn't come with bangs, sirens, and blood on the streets, but they were deaths and suffering nonetheless, and they do not deserve to be overlooked and forgotten.
Of course, Anthony Watts
couldn't help but show his true colors -- has he ever? -- as Sou wrote about
here.
It's worth remembering Watts' post about Typhoon Haiyan -- "Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda – another overhyped storm that didn’t match early reports" -- that killed
at least 6300 people. Ever classy, Watts is.
But these people are amateurs compared to Roy Spencer, the research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who is perhaps the leading climate change denialist today. Spencer also likes to claim he is Christian -- but see if you can tell that from what he
wrote on his Facebook page just 12 hours after the bloodshed in Paris:
"Fix the weather, and terrorism will go away."
Revolting.
"Yes, all of the world’s politicians who have supported a COP21 agreement should still plan on attending. And they should reach out to ISIS to join them in building a better world…a world without droughts." What can you even say to a man who would write something like this -- such a disrespectful man, such a small man?
--
Deniers are fond of complaining that the word "denier" unfairly compares them to Holocaust deniers.
I've never thought that -- the word "denier" was a perfectly good word in the English language before the Holocause, with
a particular meaning, and that meaning still exists today.
But after seeing the depths to which some climate deniers have sunk here, and so quickly, I'm left wondering if perhaps their analogy to Holocaust deniers is not so far off after all.