Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Above, Steven Colbert on the “I’m not a scientist” approach to climate denial.  This kind of ridicule of an obviously dopey dodge has made climate denying politicians increasingly uncomfortable and looking for pathways to thread a difficult path between a Fox News addled base, and the increasingly obvious reality of climate change.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

It’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998 — an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific — to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede that climate change is real?

Of course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Below, President Obama has fun with it. “I’ll just pretend I can’t read.”  The President’s mockery of the “I’m not a scientist” dodge stung so deeply that Speaker John Boehner excised that portion of the State of the Union address from the “official” Republican version posted on line, as has been noted here and elsewhere.

Chris Mathews on Marco Rubio’s science befuddlement. Maybe the earth IS 5000 years old.  See Senator Rubio’s floundering attempts to adjust, elsewhere on this page.