Climate-change deniers have never cared about "truth"; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions

Washingtonpost.com has a wonderful slide show up of 14 Tom Toles cartoons "about the environment and global warming."


"'Global warming is real,' [Berkeley physicist Richard] Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

"Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,
"The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate"

by Ken

As I write (a little after 3pm ET) there are 2358 comments on Washingtonpost.com responding to Gene Robinson's column today, "The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate." Believe me, I didn't venture deep into the muck. Here are just a couple of treasures I mined near the surface:

SteveSJ: Talk about clueless. Your article is clueless and missleading the public. But what's new?

For those who want the truth; [LINK OMITTED ON THE GROUND THAT IT'S PSYCHOTIC BULLSHIT AIMED AT DESTROYING LIFE ON EARTH -- Ed.]

Benson: Hey, Gene-Van-Winkle. Time to wake up and address our biggest current problem: unemployment.

Global Warming has long ago faded as the most important issue of the day.

While we're correcting the record, we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic. He just acknowledged that the skeptics made some good points about problems with the data, which he set out to address.

Of course these sad souls are too far gone to have any idea, not just how wrong, but how dangerously wrong, they are.

There's no way of knowing whether "Benson," for example, it's terminal stupidity or pathologically dishonest to imagine that "we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic" is an answer to Gene Robinson's characterization of "respected physicist" Richard Muller "an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own."

Even now Muller begins his October 21 WSJ piece "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism"): "Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be." However, his conclusion, after two years of research by his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, is:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

More serious, though, is Benson's delusional notion that we get to put climate disaster on the back burner while we worry about joblessness. It's a reminder that to these people, none of these "issues" are real -- it's all make-believe stuff through which they can vent the products of their diseased non-thought processes for the purpose of . . . well, you've got me. I don't know what they think the purpose of lying their putrid guts out is. I might guess that reality is just too overwhelming and, you know, real for them to cope with. What I do know, though, is that vicious, at-the-top-of-their-lungs flight from reality has become a way of life among a large (and growing) sector of the country.

In his WSJ piece Muller lays out once again why he and his colleagues thought "there are plenty of good reasons why you might be" a global-warming skeptic, except that it turns out that, well, no, there aren't. A WSJ editor has helpfully provided a blurb for the piece: "There were good reasons for doubt, until now."

So all those "reasons" were "good reasons for doubt"; they just happen to be wrong. This includes essentially all the individuals, groups, and organizations that have been routinely vilified by the Psychopathic Liars of the Right. Robinson points out, for example: "Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place." But of course that round of character assassination was never about the "truth"; these people have an apparently pathological loathing for the truth.

Robinson writes:

Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers -- a total of 1.6 billion records -- and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.

It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.

We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions -- the burning of fossil fuels by humans -- as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.

It is the know-nothing politicians -- not scientists -- who are committing an unforgivable fraud.

#