The Week in Denialism

Michael Fumento hails the new scientific orthodoxy on medieval warmth:

[T]emperatures in the Middle Ages, at the very least in the northern hemisphere, were considerably warmer than they are now. Conceding both these points in a BBC interview was Professor Phil Jones.

Of course, the denialist article of faith is that the MWP was global, and Jones didn't concede that point by any means. Nor did he concede that that it was "considerably warmer" then than it is now. But Fumento will take whatever he can get, so long as it allows him to reach this epochal conclusion:

If the medieval warming wasn't manmade, then the recent warming may not be either.

Sure. And if arsenic occurs naturally in the Ganges Delta, then these mysterious Australian arsenic deposits might well be natural too. And if Aristotle misunderstood the climate without being an amoral shill for big business, then Fumento's misunderstanding of climate may simply be an honest mistake.

Debra J. Saunders points out that teh Warmists have no one but themselves to blame for the collapse of "the global-warming machine," because "their actions and attitudes did not reflect the sort of behavior you would expect from people who truly believe that the planet is in peril."

See, if they'd truly believed we were in danger, they would've admitted that we know very little about the climate. This would've allowed them to find common ground with skeptics, who might then have been more willing to entertain their outlandish notions about warming (assuming they still had any). But instead, they got greedy, and have now "drowned out the voices of scientists -- including those who believe global warming is largely caused by man -- who have been ready to engage in the complexities of climate science." Which means that even if it turns out that they were actually right, and the climate is warming dangerously, it'll be on their heads. Suck on that, hippies!

David Harsanyi complains that Los Warmistas are comparing denialism to creationism in order to justify taking away our gas-powered lawnmowers, which could force us to trim our lawns with cuticle scissors. He's also very excited about Phil Jones' comment on the MWP. "The importance of this can't be stressed enough," he says, which is probably why he doesn't bother trying to explain it. Why make an effort when you're bound to fail?

Granted, it can be very hard to understand the things climatologists say about stuff. "I certainly can't," says Harsanyi, "despite my best efforts." That said, it don't rightly take none o' that fancy-pants book-larnin' to grasp these fundamental world-historical principles:

1. Addressing AGW costs money that would be better spent on something more important, like racial profiling.


2. We can't afford to give in to fear-mongering, especially in a world that trembles under the shadow of Islamofascism.


3. If the climate changes significantly, we'll simply adapt to it like we always do, 'cause otherwise we'd have to make burdensome economic trade-offs now, instead of waiting until after some sort of disaster strikes.


4. If climate scientists want to be taken seriously by people who can't understand their work, they must see to it that their integrity is unassailable. In other words, they need to stop trying to frighten us with problems we can't understand that probably aren't a big deal anyway and will cost way too much money to address unless we put things off for as many years as possible.


5. Gas-powered lawnmowers totally kick ass! Live free or die!
   

Last, but certainly not least, Donald Trump wants Algore to give back his ill-gotten Nobel Prize on account of it snowed a whole lot on the East Coast, even though the Goracle insisted that it would never snow anywhere on earth ever again, and especially not in winter.

Which brings up a sore point. Speaking as a rabid anti-capitalist who belongs to both schools of Cultural Marxism, I really wish the architects of the International Socialist Global Warming Hoax had been a bit more alert to the possibility that a couple of big snowstorms would come along and destroy all our carefully laid plans. I've been promising my comrades down at the Birkenstock factory that we'd see the Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Halloween, at the very latest. What the hell am I supposed to tell them now?

(Photo: "Lichen and shrub-covered palsas surrounded by a pond resulting from melting permafrost in a bog near the village of Radisson, Canada.")