NEW YORK—On Friday, the infamous Westboro Baptist Church could be found—offensive signs in hand—on the Upper West Side, protesting the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. According to members of the church, they wanted to inform the scientists within (who study the effect of climate change) that "when God starts pouring out his wrath—and one of the ways he does that is by using the weather—there's not one thing they're going to be able to do to stop it."

The Westboro folks told Ars that "God is going to destroy this Earth with Fire," and apparently no amount of carbon reduction or even research into the subject will be sufficient to prevent it. The protesters held little stock in science, referring us instead to passages of the Bible that describe the end of the world in a cleansing fire.

When we suggested that the amount of warming that was predicted by current climate models still fell some way short of a fiery blaze, this idea was dismissed as "angels dancing on the head of a pin." To their credit, the Westboro Baptist protesters told us they didn't want to change anyone's minds, even if they did dismiss science and research as just so much "blah blah blah."

It was a brief encounter, and no one came away from it with their minds changed. Perhaps fittingly—given the somewhat surreal nature of our conversation—the protest took place within sight of Tom's Restaurant, made famous in countless episodes of Seinfeld.

Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin