The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

We're still arguing about this?

Geologist James Powell points out that the peer-review process keeps finding in favor of climate change:

The most obvious criticsism—that this is an argumentum ad populum—only works if you misunderstand how science works. Every scientist has an implicit incentive to prove some other scientist wrong. You can make your career in science by showing that the received wisdom doesn't fit all the evidence. So the numbers in that pie chart have to raise eyebrows, even if the eyes under them have blinders on.

Since the planet has been hotter in the past, I don't worry that global climate change will kill everyone. In fact, Chicago will probably do fine, as will the Canadian plains and much of central Asia.

The problem with the American right wing, not to mention other governments worldwide, is that by refusing to believe the climate is changing—regardless of the cause—they're refusing to take simple actions against the predictable consequences of it. Ostriches don't stick their heads in the sand in real life, because if they were to do that, they'd be killed by the things they were hiding from. Of all earth's species, only humans can look at impending doom and ignore it. Or, to put it another way:

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