From the paper’s editorial today (2/22/10) on climate change deniers:
The Earth is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it’s likely that in coming decades the globe’s climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.
Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph.
That’s especially true if “what you may have read lately” includes the Washington Post, one day earlier (2/21/10), in which George F. Will declared:
A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.
Why is it always the fanatics who accuse others of blind faith?
“Why is it always the fanatics who accuse others of blind faith?”
Answer: psychological projection.
Anybody happen to have been to the right wing website “aim.org”, better known as accuracy in media?
Well, it’s interesting…they do all they can to appear similar to this site but they block all liberal comments on their stories. Their ideology must be pretty fragile not to be able to handle criticism or even anything but right wing responses to be heard.
WaPo has transformed its editorial page in recent years to feature a motley gang of conservatives. My nominees for a Rogues Gallery of Doomsayers: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Gerson. Their guest editorialists are just as bad; today (February 26) they even had Sen. Tom Coburn. I read only about half of each day’s editorials, skipping these whom I know have little to offer except negative criticism of liberality.
I have to laugh at the people who claim George Will has some integrity…….relative to whom, the rightwing demagogic scamps even further to the right? What George has is pomposity. And a bow-tie. Also he has a patina of literacy, as did William Buckley, which makes his bullshit sound credible. Credible to the gullible, that is. But Will has parroted the Republican line as obediently as anyone over the past 30 years. His attempt to dismiss the overwhelming scientific evidence of globalwarming and its disastrous implications makes him no better than flatearthers like ventriloquist dummy Senators Inhofe and Coburn of Petrol-oklahoma, who have always mouthed what their corporate-oil keepers told them to say.
God a Mercy!yes,I have right wing friends and so much is taboo when I talk with them.A neighbor here thinks global warming is a politician’s invention.Why isnt the more accurate “climate change”used?
Most of politically savvy folks I know are either NGO’s online,or famous writers of like ilk whose lectures one can attend ,and buy their books.
Of the terms used to describe the current global atmospheric conditions I prefer “Climate Warming” because that phrase succinctly describes the situation. “Global Warming” is inaccurate, the atmosphere can’t really warm the Earth below it that much and “Climate Change” is precluded by the lack of evidence suggesting any possibility of cooling.
In Eric Alterman’s book about the punditocracy, Sound and Fury, he relates how George Will, when first offered a column at the Post, asked, in all candor, “Does this mean I have to give up writing speeches for Jesse Helms?” That pretty much tells you all you need to know.
What is this world coming to when a big snowstorm in Washington DC doesn’t shut up those who believe global warming is real? George Will should love global climate change with all it’s “contradictions” and convolutions that scarcely a regular human can understand.
Science is never wrong? Like eugenics? For decades it was generally regarded as fact, and many states sterilized, by force or deception, people they deemed unworthy of procreating. And it was the inspiration for the Final Solution. Oops.
And I am old enough to remember all that 1970s talk about the world becoming colder.
Carbon trading is just another giant taxpayer ripoff.
And then there’s global DIMMING:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/757.html
I’ve had the pleasure of having a response to a George Will column published. Some of the above comments gave me a good laugh (thanks Moby Doug) and I remember the pontifications of that snot-nosed (sorry to speak ill of the dead) William Buckley. / I’m not sure about global warming but who can argue that population pollution is doing horrible things to the planet. I think our past “eugenics” problems have made overpopulation a taboo-subject. // Jean Clelland-Morin
Why is it only rich whites that live in the northern hemisphere argue there is no such thing as global warming?
The arguments for or against global warming will continue, probably until the oceans boil, but isn’t it the best side of prudence to assume the worst and work toward the better? “Clean coal” and nuclear energy should not even be on the table–consider Vermont.