(cross-posted at Longmont YourHub, a community blog)
Those poor holdout soldiers - nobody told them the war is over. They're clutching tight to their rusted, useless rifles, proudly waving tattered flags and swearing never to surrender islands that nobody's fighting for anymore.
In Longmont, our local holdout is Richard Yale - a prolific contributor to a community blog I also post to. His latest diatribe: 35 Inconvenient Truths & Efficacy of Indulgences - is a classic outing in global climate change denialism. The core of his article seems to be this: climate change is a lie because Al Gore refuses to debate someone from "Science and Public Policy," an Exxon-funded "think tank." Mr. Yale's link to the group's website is broken, but you can see their Gore criticism here.
Mr. Yale's article illustrates a very real problem the GOP has created for itself. They don't mind the fact that the scientific community is in overwhelming consensus that climate change is real, man-made and a problem: they can always find some hungry scientist who's willing to recite contrary sound bites. No, the problem for the GOP is that the public has caught on, and climate change denialism is now a big political loser.
So here they are, the wiser ones among them trying somehow to back down from a position that has been at the core of their brand. How do you do that? Very slowly, very carefully, and very subtly. You certainly don't have a press conference saying "we were wrong."
But as the party leadership starts to abandon the trenches and slip like ghosts up into the hills, they're leaving behind a lot of loud, proud spokesmen who didn't get the memo. Poor souls like Mr. Yale, who (among others) is reduced to citing a British court decision, of all things, to make his point.
Mr. Yale engages in amazing hyperbole. He compares the idea of carbon credits to the infamous "indulgences" the medieval Roman Catholic Church sold to sinners looking to buy their way into heaven. And he declares the denialist website to be the equivalent of Martin Luther's 95 Theses (which he charmingly calls the "95 Thesis"). He calls efforts to confront climate change the result of " hysteria and paranoia instead of reason and the scientific method."
When someone believes deeply that the bulk of the scientific community is involved in a conspiracy to undermine the world economy, perhaps he should think carefully before using the term "paranoia."