Wednesday, July 25, 2012

How to Fight Climate Change Deniers

Our problem coping with climate change skeptics could be solved, perhaps, by bringing them out in the open - the lot of them, all at once.

Climate change science mainly goes in one direction.   Whether the discipline is geology, biology, botany, atmospherics, hydrology, glaciology, epidemiology, oceanography, chemistry, you name it, the research is mostly corroborative of the central theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Climate change denialism, however, is not cohesive, anything but.   Instead of coming to a premise based on collective knowledge and facts, denialism begins with a premise - man-made global warming is untrue - and then tries to create facts to support it.   And, when it comes to creating those supporting facts, almost anything goes - conspiracy, hoax, sunspots, natural variation, socialist plots, men from Mars - it's all good.

When denialists gather, once or twice a year, you can have all these whacko theories presented and they're all accepted, even though they're widely inconsistent and often contradictory.    What emerges are a dozen or more people gathered in the same room each with a different reality.   Now in the real world we call that an asylum.

A lot of people don't grasp the importance of the multi-disciplinary corroborative element to climate science.   That needs to change.   Somehow the message must get out that the theory of global warming is being put to the test within all of these scientific fields and the resulting research is confirming the basic theory of global warming.   These scientists are seeing what should exist based on the theory of global warming.   Hydrologists are finding it.   Geologists are finding it.   Biologists, botanists and zoologists are finding it.   So too are chemists, oceanographers, glaciologists, even epidemiologists.   And all their independent research and knowledge is confirming the central theory.

Denialists don't confirm anything.   They conjure up theories, dozens of them, to refute the one theory they can neither contradict nor disprove.   So let's get them out in the open, collectively, and let's show them for the scoundrels and lunatics they are, and let the public truly see them for what they are.

1 comment:

Anyong said...

Like the Koch Brothers?