State of denial

My dad was talking about a public figure one time, and called the man "ignorant."  Then he looked thoughtful, and amended his assessment to "stupid."

I asked him what the difference was.

"Ignorance just means you don't know stuff," he explained.  "Ignorance can be cured.  Stupidity, on the other hand, means you're ignorant and you don't care.  Maybe you're even proud of it...  Put a different way, ignorance is only skin-deep.  Stupidity goes all the way to the bone."

Wise man, my dad.

I can't help but think that if he were alive today, he'd have applied the word "stupid" to the people currently determining the direction our country takes apropos of climate change.  There's a willfulness about the way they choose to ignore the consensus of close to 100% of trained, qualified climate scientists in favor of the self-serving nonsense coming from the fossil fuels industry (and the elected officials in their pay).

As urban designer Brent Toderian put it: "If 97% of structural engineers told you that a bridge was unsafe, would you still drive across it?"

That kind of argument doesn't resonate with the people currently running our government, unfortunately.  I woke up to the news yesterday morning (buried amongst hundreds of pieces speculating on the meaning of "covfefe") that Trump was almost certain to pull the United States out of the Paris Accord, and sure enough, yesterday afternoon Trump himself confirmed it.

Which, by the way, would throw us in with only two other countries in the world -- Syria and Nicaragua.

Because the leadership of those two countries is clearly what we want to emulate.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But there's an added twist to the climate change denialism in the United States government, and that has come about because of the Trump administration's bizarre, if wildly successful, courting of the Religious Right.  Now, there is an increasing message coming from evangelical Christian politicians and spokespeople that okay, maybe the climate is changing, but we shouldn't worry about it...

... because god's gonna fix it.

I kid you not.  Let's start with Michigan Representative Tim Walberg, who said in a town hall meeting that he's not at all concerned:

I believe there’s climate change.  I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time.  I believe there are cycles.  Do I think man has some impact?  Yeah, of course.  Can man change the entire universe?  No. 

Why do I believe that?  Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us.  And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.

Okay, first, does this guy really think that scientists are saying that climate change will affect the entire universe?  Like, if we cut down the forests and pollute the atmosphere and burn up all the coal and oil here on Earth, some alien civilization in the Andromeda Galaxy will die a horrible death?  Because that goes way beyond stupid, into that rarefied atmosphere called "Holy fuck, that's idiotic."

But a deeper problem, of course, is that such a stance absolves us of any need to change our ways now.  We can continue to burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, continue to give nothing more than lip service to renewable energy, continue to allow our elected officials to sit in the deep pockets of the petroleum industry.

Pretty convenient, that.

Then there's right-wing radio host Erick Erickson, who said pretty much the same thing in a series of tweets, which I string together here for the sake of space:

I worship Jesus, not Mother Earth.  He calls us all to be good stewards of the planet, but doesn't mean I have to care about global warming...  100000000% sure my kids will have a habitable planet.  This sort of hysteria is exactly why I couldn't care less about global warming...  The tweets of those upset with me on global warming have a religious fervor to them because by faith they believe so much of the doom&gloom...  Dammit, I'm gonna be drunk off the tears of people crying over the Paris Accord before my show starts.

What, do you think that the people who understand climate science want the Earth's ecosystems to destabilize?  Nutjobs like Erickson act as if coming to a conclusion and liking the conclusion are the same thing.  And now, we're supposed to take his "100000000%" assurance that everything is fine over the knowledge, expertise, and data of trained scientists?

In any case, don't worry about it, because Jesus.

Oh yeah, and liberal tears, har-de-har-har, and all that sorta stuff.

This kind of nonsense would be comical if it wasn't for the fact that people like Walberg and Erickson are currently in the driver's seat with regards to our entire country's climate policy.  So that moves it from the "comical" column to the "scary" column.

Worst, it means that the people who are making decisions for us are not just ignorant, but willfully ignorant.  I.e., what my dad would have called "stupid."  And since stupidity is so seldom limited to one subject, that should be profoundly scary to all of us, because we're all going to have to live with the consequences of where these nimrods are dragging us.

Aftermath of the storm

The biggest winter storm yet this season has spun its way out into the north Atlantic, after burying parts of the northeast under as much as four feet of snow, and this has activated two groups of people.

The first is the cadre of folks who don't understand meteorology, and think that multi-variable analysis of winds, surface and upper atmosphere temperatures, air moisture content, and pressure gradients should give you predictions of snowfall totals accurate to five significant figures.  You have your people who got more snow than they thought they were going to, inconveniencing their lives (clearly the weather forecasters' fault), and the ones who got less than they feared, causing them to batten down the hatches unnecessarily (again, blame the forecasters).

"I want that job!" one person commented.  "Half right half the time, no better than guessing, and they still get paid."

I dunno.  Considering that Long Island, most of Boston and Providence, and coastal Maine are still digging themselves out, the forecasters did pretty damn well.  We'd have experienced a tad more inconvenience, don't you think, if we hadn't had any warning that the storm was coming?

Aftermath of Winter Storm Juno in New York [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But worse than the scoffers is the group of people who think that "it gets cold in winter" is equivalent to "climate change isn't real."  These include Donald Trump:

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.  Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.

Amazing that someone could pack so much nonsense into two sentences.  First of all, "global warming" hasn't been "very expensive" yet, because we haven't done a fucking thing about it, mostly because our leaders are still arguing over whether it exists.  The planet's not freezing, nor are we experiencing "record low temps;" in fact, 2014 was the hottest year on record.  And you'd think Trump himself would be nice and warm, considering the dead possum he wears on his head.

Then there's RedState.com's Erick Erickson, who added a religious filagree to the whole thing with the following baffling statement:

The difference between people who believe in the 2nd coming of Jesus and those who believe in global warming is that Jesus will return.

Maybe if Jesus does return, he could explain to these mental midgets the difference between "weather" and "climate."

Then there's Fox Business's Stuart Varney, who apparently not only doesn't know the difference between weather and climate, but doesn't understand the Law of Conservation of Mass.  A recent study found that Antarctic sea ice was increasing in volume, and Varney says that because of this, we should be "looking at global cooling, not global warming" -- neglecting the fact that Antarctica is losing continental ice faster than it's gaining sea ice, meaning that there's a net loss.  (And even the gain in sea ice was predicted by climate change models; it's due to warmer air temperatures, higher humidity, and higher precipitation in the form of snowfall.)

But no such spew of foolishness would be complete without Rush Limbaugh weighing in.  Every time his name comes up, I marvel that anyone is still listening to this bloviating gas bag, but apparently enough people are that he's still on the air.  And here's his take on the weather:

I can't tell you the number of times a record or major snow storm has been forecast -- this year alone -- I was just trying to think last night, trying to recall a couple of instances where they forecast something that is going to be really, really bad, and it hasn't even come close to being, not even close to bad, much less really, really bad. And not just in New York but elsewhere around the country. It's been a horrible, horrible year for forecasts. And the reason is, if i can cut to the quick, the left has corrupted everything. Just like the left has corrupted the professoriate, the faculty at major institutions of higher learning, the left has populated all of these bureaucracies. The Department of Commerce runs the National Weather Service, and do not believe that they're not politicized.

So now the weather has a liberal bias?

What earthly reason would liberals (or anyone else, for that matter) have for exaggerating storm impacts?  Oh, wait, I forgot; the left wants to destroy America.  Because, um, bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, that's why.  So they bring major cities along the East Coast to their knees with warnings about a nonexistent winter storm, so as to accomplish their evil goals.  And then... the storm shows up, pretty much right on target, bringing the cities even more to their knees.  Faked 'em out, didn't they!  Ha!

That's how evil those liberals are.

Maybe the liberals even created the storm, you think?  Using their commie pinko leftist snow-making machines, imported directly from the Soviet Union.  (Yes, I know the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more.  Shush, I'm on a roll.)  Who knows what they'll do next?  Maybe this year they'll use their Tornado-making Machine to send tornadoes to Kansas, and their Hurricane-making Machine to launch hurricanes at the Gulf Coast, thereby sending these areas exactly the kind of weather they usually get.

Now that's some first-class evil.

Look, as I've mentioned before, I'm really not very political myself.  I'm a science nerd, not a political science wonk.  I'm much happier wearing my lab coat and my black plastic-framed glasses with electrical tape around the middle than I am discussing policy.  So although I don't much care what you believe in terms of politics, I can say with some authority that we all need to stop believing the talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson and Donald "Scalp Possum" Trump, and start listening to the scientists.  They may not be 100% accurate, but their models and predictions are a damn sight better than they were even ten years ago.

On the other hand, maybe it's just easier to wait until a really hot day this summer, and point out that if a snowy day in winter disproves climate change, then a hot day in summer proves it.  If that's the kind of logic that works with these people, it's worth trying.

It's a little like the guy who is asked by his friend to go behind his car and see if the turn signal is working, and yells back, "Yes.  No.  Yes.  No.  Yes.  No."