Impervious to Evidence

Another day, another metric ton of denialist horseshit from George Will.

Fine. Whatever. We'll do this quickly.

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere "plateau," not warming's apogee, the [New York Times] assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

Knowing the future, y'see, is reserved for George Will, who can effortlessly tell when a plateau is an apogee, on account of his mama didn't raise no suckas.

Impressive as that is, it's child's play compared to what comes next:

The Times reported that "scientists" -- all of them? -- say the 11 years of temperature stability has "no bearing," none, on long-term warming. Some scientists say "cool stretches are inevitable."

Will implies that all scientists must agree that warming will continue for the claim to have any hope of being plausible. At the same, he assigns a belief that all scientists actually do agree on, viz., that "cool stretches are inevitable," to some scientists. (As for the fact that climate is ideally measured in consecutive periods of 30 years...well, the less said about that, the better.)

If there's a more grotesque example of sophistry in the annals of denialism, it was written by George Will, and appears in the very next paragraph:

[T]heories predicting catastrophe from man-made climate change are impervious to evidence. The theories are unfalsifiable, at least in the "short run." And the "short run" is defined as however many decades must pass until the evidence begins to fit the hypotheses.

Emphasis added. Many of us learned the problem with this line of reasoning by flipping coins in grade school; Will probably should have grasped it by the time he got to Magdalen College, Oxford. But who cares about arcane disciplines like statistics? If we don't see 16 feet of water in Wall Street by this time next week, AGW is a hoax!

I don't think any denialist is going to top that...unless his name be George Will:

[Prince Charles] said that by 2050 the planet will be imperiled by the existence of 9 billion people, a large portion of them consuming as much as Western people now do. Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their predictions lest they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable faux pas of denying that the world is coming to an end.

Though it may be arrogant of me to correct an exquisitely sapient grandee like Will on a minor point of cultural literacy, it just so happens that Cassandra's predictions were correct; the problem was that no one would believe her.

As for his larger argument...what the fuck? Or to phrase it more judiciously, what the fucking fuck? The alarmist prediction that we'll have 9 billion people by 2050 contradicts alarmist predictions about climate change, because...what? If warming were a real problem, population wouldn't...huh? Does anyone on God's green earth have the faintest idea what this unsurpassable douchebag is going on about?

My neurasthenia seems to be acting up, so I'm going to take some bromide and lie down with my galvanic belt. In the meantime, I suggest you look at this Random Kitten Generator.