Climate Sunday: CPAC Edition

One of the main contributors, I allege, to human-caused climate change, is gross stupidity. CPAC released gross stupidity at times in rather the way fracking releases methane.  Here's an example of the problem:


Because if you observe that sometimes, it is still cold in winter, then that clearly overrides over a century of temperature tracking and thousands of years of climate modelling derived from hundreds of sources of proxy data, all grounded in actual science that say, not that we don't sometimes have cold days, but that, in general,  the average temperature of the earth is going up--NOT!

This kind of shorthand "but snow in winter!" type of thinking is lazy and generates laughs, but it depends so much on not wanting to believe. I can't blame them. It sucks to think that the way we've been deriving the energy that enables us to power the industrialized world of ease and comfort in which we live--a life, for those of us in the so-called first world, which has damn near never been cushier, and has made some humans who are directly involved in the fossil-fuel industry wealthy enough to make Croesus look like the cash-strapped relation we don't invite to family reunions so that he needn't embarrass himself with mooching.  It has to occur to them that there will be a trade-off of both convenience and wealth as we switch to safer, more climate-neutral energy sources. Economically, it also may seem like a reasonable bet that dirty energy (if one can allow that climate change/or at least pollution might be a real thing) is a bargain we can deal with right up until everyone achieves a kind of economic parity, and can adopt green energy freely because the market has announced itself--or whatever. (And in the meanwhile, the poorest on the globe are going to be the ones who most directly suffer from climate change--so, like, that is not as reasonable as all that.)

But the above clip doesn't strike me as being about reasonable concerns. It is, rather, a "Fuck you" to killjoy liberals who aren't either so smart and who just want everyone to have a bad time for no reason. And it sounds to me so much more like a petulant child deciding that eating all the Easter candy at once isn't either going to make him sick and you're a no-fun meany-weiner for saying so. There is hardly any person who, on hearing that, having decided that climate change is really real and understands the consequences, who is going to say anything other than "WTF?"

But at venues like CPAC, "we are so eating all the Easter candy (or drinking all the soda) and you are not the boss of me" is an actual serious viewpoint.

That genuinely unnerves me. These are supposed to be adults.