Honestly….these are supposed to be the smartest people in the room?

Ben Adler at Grist has an article entitled “Why there is no liberal equivalent to climate change denial“. He builds upon arguments from Paul Krugman that conservatives have a way of denying facts that liberals don’t when it comes to supporting their ideological beliefs.

It’s a clever argument, and I’m sure it will convince many weak minds. I have to wonder whether Adler and Krugman are also convinced of what they write.

What they have done is basically redefined the term “fact” to be anything that Liberals believe is an established fact.

I’m going to set aside their examples of creation-vs-evolution, or the optimum marginal tax rate, or whether conservatives only want smaller government but liberals want improved social welfare. Instead, I’ll just get to Adler’s central claim that there is no liberal equivalent to “climate change denial”.

Of course there are liberal equivalents. For example, here are seven that immediately come to mind:

1) natural climate change denial

2) denial that coal and petroleum work better than unicorn farts as fuels,

3) denial that a small amount of warming is better than killing millions of poor people by restricting access to inexpensive energy,

4) denial that the human-induced component of climate change is anything but catastrophic and an emergency,

5) denial that an increasing number of scientists are becoming skeptics,

6) denial that IPCC scientists were caught red-handed trying to silence the opposition and “hide the decline”,

7) denial of the observations, which show much less warming than any of the climate models can explain over the last 30+ years.

I’m sure I could think of more, but I don’t like to waste any more time than necessary answering such silly claims.

For supposedly being able to understand nuances, these guys can’t admit that most conservatives really do believe that humans have some influence on climate. We just don’t think the scientific and economic evidence supports spreading more misery around the globe than liberal policies have already created.