Comments idahoooo has made

Climate Change Denier Rhetoric

Dear Gristmill,

This has been bugging me for a long time, and it is not just you.  I keep hearing this phrase, and I hate it.  Can you tell the people who come up with the talking points to tone down the "denier" rhetoric a notch or two?  At least refrain from doing it yourself.  I formally call shenanigan on this style of argument.  It makes you sound more like a religeous zealot shouting "heretic"  than people who are concerned with a correcting a problem.    Mr.Michaels may very well be a rent-a-geek schilling for the energy industry. Calling him a climate change obfuscator might is a lot more accurate (although not as catchy), but shouting "Heretic!" when somebody questions the prevailing conventional wisdom makes y'all sound like Pat Robertson in Birkenstocks.  Are the Jesus approved diet shakes next?  Save the denier talk for people who think the holocaust was a hoax and the earth is flat.  The Earth's climate is an extraordinarlily complex thing, and there is abundant credible evidence to indicate that the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over the past two centuries is causing our planet to retain more heat.  Because climate is a global phenomena, there are bound to be a lot of changes when we mess with it.  Duh.  What those changes are, how fast they occur, and what we do to either counteract or adapt to them is a whole other ball of wax, with a lot less certainty.  Language that conflates those who disagree with predictions of future events in extraordinarilly complex systems such as the climate, with the wackjobs who deny the occurrence of well established historical facts, like the holocaust and the shape of the planet does a disservice to your argument, and is easy ammo for those who would like to discredit your argument.

BTW, I reserve the right to take back everything I said here if Mr. Michaels ever authors a paper stating that global warming is impossible, because the exra CO2 simply falls off the edge of the planet before any warming can occur.On Small Colorado coal burner pays big bucks to climate change denier posted 3 years, 4 months ago 2 Responses