Okay, so at the recent Heartless Heartland skeptic/denier/disinformer/climate-destroyer conference (I promise to propose a better term this week!), one of the few attendees who was a non-non-believer in science emailed me the following:

Marc Morano, Sen. Inhofe's press secretary, just cited your post on the dangers of consensus as an example of how deniers are forcing climate action proponents to retreat. "We're making them afraid of using the term 'consensus'!"

Now, that is humor! After all, my article is titled "The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there's no consensus about global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome]," and it explains that:

1. "Consensus" is far too weak a word to describe the collective scientific understanding of the dangers of human-caused global warming.
2. The reality of climate change is almost certainly going to be much worse than the "consensus" as that term is normally used (to describe the IPCC reports).
3. The deniers are peddling pseudoscience.

I confess that RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt did warn me that the disinformers might do this, and I was skeptical they would contemplate such Orwellian rhetoric (I am a skeptic at heart). Silly me. Sillier Morano. Silliest Inhofe.

As the WSJ environmental blog noted, the Heartland disinformer conference ended with more unintentional humor -- a "Manhattan Declaration" whose first recommendation said this:

Now, therefore, we recommend: That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular but misguided works such as An Inconvenient Truth.

The WSJ thinks it's funny they would start with an attack on Gore -- and it is. But I think what's even funnier is that the disinformers urged world leaders to reject the IPCC, even though the leaders' representatives already signed off on a line-by-line edit/review of all the IPCC summaries.

The second recommendation is much less funny:

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Wait, that sounds strangely familiar ... My Dante is a bit rusty, but I believe it was ... La Divina Commedia ... yes, now it's coming to me ... Canto III.9:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

My medieval Tuscan is even rustier, but I think the line translates something like this:

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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