Joe Barton is a dumbass.

This goober is Joe Barton of Texas. He supposes that climate change might be a net good. He's not real bright. Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon ripped his hide better than I could:

So, he’s actually trying to argue that because we breathe CO2 out, that means that it is impossible for it to be a greenhouse gas, which is the “my shit don’t stink” argument if I ever heard one. We know that Barton knows he’s lying, by the way, because if we offered to put him in a room full of nothing but CO2 on the grounds that we breathe it out and so it must be completely harmless, I think he’d decline. But of course, even that misses the point. No one is arguing that global warming is bad because we don’t want to breathe CO2. We’re arguing that global warming is bad because the climate change is going to be ruinous to the ecosystem that we rely on for survival.

Of course, what Barton is trying to do is have it both ways: argue against the reality of global warming while also arguing that it’s a something we should embrace. But you can’t have it both ways. To say that global warming is positive is to admit that it exists. To deny that it exists is to admit that it’s a bad thing that will happen. Conservatives are up a creek in a sense on this, because they want an argument that will get both people who are resentful of reality and people who perceive it and therefore are eager to push lies for the hell of it, and people who have enough self-respect to not want to be seen as someone too stupid to get the evidence for global warming, but want to minimize the ugly reality of it. Unfortunately, as I noted earlier, there’s no penalty for throwing out contradictory arguments. There’s no penalty for throwing out absurdly stupid arguments, either.

The best thing she does is delineate the different arguments out there: some know climate change is true and deny it for whatever personal political reason, some see global warming is true but would rather not be involved in doing anything about it, but neither is an argument against its existance. It exists if they want to acknowledge it does or not. They can cite whatever other theory they might have for what else encourages climate change, but it is mostly CO2.

And they have no answer--so they change the question. Should we stop climate change?


(The denialists say no--it isn't natural to stop our industrial progress.)

Is there any benefit? (Does Joe Barton suppose we just will all have nice mild winters, but hotter climes won't see droughts or desertification, or the oceans won't continue to acidify, or rise? He seems to think there is a net benefit, but with ruined desert farmland and dead spots in the oceans, and climes approaching the unliveable in just the bands of continents like Africa and South America where people actually live, I would say there is no benefit.)

He's resting a lot on the idea that climate change, projected outward, is something we can adapt to--but no. It is occurring in recognizable increments of time. It won't mean more bikinis and short-shorts. It'll mean more species extinction, and people dying of diseases, and farming going haywire.

It's dumb what he has to say. Just thought I'd realate it. And let other minds decide.