The following is my weekly letter to our local weekly newspaper:
A
recent cartoon featured Dilbert
attacked verbally by co-worker “Alice”: “I got your stupid email with your
stupid link to that stupid scientific study. I don’t care about your so-called
‘facts.’ I know I’m right!”
Like “Alice,” local writers' emotional venting
instead of facts doesn’t advance the natural climate change denier argument. Natural
disasters cause great suffering, but would cause even more if the frequency of
strong hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, and wildfires was as great now
as pre-1960. Unfortunately, the past half-century of unusually benign weather tricked
people into exercising bad judgment and building their homes in precarious
places.
Luckily, I’m not thin skinned. Al Gore at theSocial Good Summit in New York last week likened skeptics like me to
homophobes, racists, and violent alcoholics. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer affiliated my kind with arsonists, hostage-takers
and suicide bombers. Aren’t my remarks tame in comparison,
Mr. Walker?
Mr. Walker exhibits Liberal thin skin. When Tom
Elias uses easily detected false “facts” and is believed, don’t his believers
qualify along with him as the opposite of smart? I posed the question “stupid”
to facilitate their self-identification.
It’s only because facts support us that we’re so
effective. Natural climate change deniers outspend skeptics by at least $1,000
to $1; ExxonMobil hasn’t supported skeptic groups for years, and Big Oil money
has gone to extreme green groups.
Chesapeake Energy alone gave $25 million to the
Sierra Club for the radical organization’s anti-coal campaign. That one grant
is ten times more money than the Heartland Institute received from all fossil
fuel energy companies in its entire 29-year history, yet skeptics have the
alarmists on the ropes.
Alarmist ad hominem attacks fail while skeptical
science prevails. Warming isn’t scary when there’s none for over fifteen years.
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