Having spent a few days asserting that the murders at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado had nothing to do with the political/religious views of the twisted fanatic who pulled the trigger, the Republicans talking on my TV have performed a quick pivot and are now asserting that the most recent incident of gun carnage in America has everything to do with the political/religious views of the twisted fanatics who pulled the trigger. The only thing they're consistent about is that none of the killing has anything to do with the ease with which all the twisted fanatics can go to the store and arm themselves as if they were planning to kill everyone in North Dakota instead of just a few handfuls of Americans at work.
Meanwhile, on another topic, the climate conference in Paris, Power Line philosopher John Hinderaker has been exhibiting a similar dexterity of thought. His views on climate change seem to be evolving. In "Global Cooling Alert," a post from February of 2008, he begins:
When Scott [Johnson] and I wrote "The Global Warming Hoax" in 1992 . . . .
In those days, the warming earth was a "hoax" perpetuated on the gullible by a cabal of just about all the world's climate scientists working in concert with other "leftists." It appears, however, that sometime over the past 20 to 25 years the hoax theory has been supplanted. Here is Hinderaker last week:
With the latest U.N. confab scheduled to begin in Paris on Monday, global warming hysteria is being hyped by governments around the world. Reality, though, tends to intrude, as it did in Paris just a week or two ago. Between bullets and bombs on one hand, and the theoretical prospect of a one degree increase in average world temperatures on the other, which would bring us closer to the mean over the last 10,000 years, most people don’t hesitate.
Let's just give him a pass for suggesting that we can't, or shouldn't, combat both terrorism and climate change. Is it possible to detect in the theoretical prospect of of a one degree increase in average world temperatures a grudging acknowledgment that the claim of a hoax was itself something of a hoax? Sure, he's sloppy about details. One degree on what scale? No one would be sounding an alarm if the worst-case scenario was an earth toasted by one extra Fahrenheit degree. Scientists worry that we are now doomed to going past 2 degrees on the Celsius scale, and we haven't yet begun to take remedial action. (There are 1.8 Fahrenheit degrees for every 1 degree Celsius.) The bit about the 10,000 year mean is a red herring on steroids. The earth back then was not home to more than 7 billion people, I don't know how many millions of them inhabiting coastal cities in danger of being submerged by melting ice and rising seas. Ten thousand years gets you back roughly to the time that human beings in the Fertile Crescent first developed agriculture. They might not have done it if beset by mass movements of other human beings seeking a new place to live.
The problem, I think, is that the question of climate change is grounded in science, and Hinderaker's scientific views are just subsidiaries of his political ones. In laughably inept fashion, he denies evolution, too. He would probably deny the atomic theory, and the theory that the earth goes 'round the sun, but for the fact that these cause no trouble for right-wing politics, American-style.
The advance of science is persuading wingnuts to shift their tactics. That climate scientists and wild-eyed liberals have been pushing a fraud was never very plausible. But now it's not even a useful dodge. The new dodge is variations of, "Well, maybe they're not hoaxers, but they're certainly exaggerators (which is not what I was when I called them 'hoaxers'").
Alas, the science of a particular question does not vary according to the volume of voice employed by detractors, even if they're packing.
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