Let It Snow!

If it's snowing, global warming must be a hoax. Sir Oolius has discovered an intrepid engineer whose homemade chart of snowfall measurements proves that it's been snowing quite a lot in various places.

This will be a staggering blow to skeptics who've already moved on to the "unstoppable global warming every 1500 years" mantra. I think it may be time to stop fighting denialists with facts to which they're immune, and start confronting them with the opposing claims of other denialists. Like cures like, or so I hear.

These are tough times for skeptics, in all but the financial sense; the forces arrayed against them are ever more rampant and ululant. In addition to the supermajority of scientists who've been blackmailed or browbeaten into conformity with the Goracle - that's what they're calling him at Planet Gore, honest - there's President Bush, who said "I recognise the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."

And the Military Advisory Board, comprising "11 of the most senior retired U.S. admirals and generals," which claims that "the U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability."

And Hollywood, whose interest in using climate alarmism to promote the global redistribution of wealth requires no explanation.

Help is on the way, though. James Inhofe has cobbled together a new report which states that "Only 52 Scientists Participated in UN IPCC Summary." This odd claim is sourced to an article by John McLean, who actually says that 62 scientists participated.

Which is a ridiculous assertion, as Tim Lambert explains at length. But Inhofe's goon squad apparently felt it needed to be made more ridiculous. After percolating through the denialist blogosphere, it'll probably shrink to 22.

The best part of McLean's hit piece is his claim that "of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors." Here's what he fails to mention:

[A]round 90% of these rejected comments originated from one reviewer: Vincent Gray (who has never published a climate article in a peer-reviewed journal) of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project that is headed by both Canadian “climate expert” Timothy Ball (oil funded, hasn’t published a peer-reviewed paper in 14 years), and the same Tom Harris authoring the original article.

There are reasonable arguments to be made against climate change predictions, so why do denialists keep concocting such ludicrous talking points? Because limiting themselves to reasonable arguments would implicitly support the very worldview they hope to defeat. What's needed is chaos and confusion, driven by the vanity that comes with the possession of awe-inspiring secret knowledge, and this requires generating as many outrageous arguments and as much conspiratorial innuendo as possible.

The danger is having too few talking points, not too many; whether they're true on any level is far less important than whether they're available - and flattering - to the people who hunger for them.