Future historians will marvel at the seamless, hermetically sealed stupidity of Climate Deniers like Senator James Inhofe.
Future historians will marvel at the seamless, hermetically sealed stupidity of Climate Deniers like Senator James Inhofe.
Here’s what will actually happen.
Climate deniers will stop denying that climate change has occurred and is occurring. Instead, they will firmly assert that although climate change is real, human activity has absolutely nothing to do with it and will continue to oppose any action to limit climate change by reducing CO2 emissions.
Actually, although we can still limit climate change to some degree, there will now be considerable change regardless of any action we can take. It is too late to limit it to acceptable levels. We will have to learn to live with it and that will not be easy. The current refugee crisis clearly shows that the world’s political systems are not able to cope adequately with refugees. Unless political changes occur to do a much better job of accommodating refugees, we will be in real trouble when there are hundreds of millions of climate refugees. Our civilizations could be badly damaged.
Once people become convinced that climate change is real (because in many cases they have begun to see the impacts near where they live) it becomes difficult for the deniers to sell them the idea that human activity is not involved. Two reasons: first, there is no consistent or credible alternative explanation, and that is obvious to everyone. Second, the same people who maintained in the past that there was no global warming (urban heat island effect, “hidden declines” and similar nonsense) are the ones now denying the importance of human activity – so their credibility is pretty much shot.
The deniers then are thrown back on running interference with their old, old line that the climate has been erratic before – a kind of irrelevant non-explanation involving Vikings, Roman wine and Harry Potter (why not?). This drivel has been debunked so often, and is so old hat, that it has lost any potency it might once have had. Like the proverbial parrot, it has ceased to be.