The "ice age" meme has been around a long time. I recall my John Birch Society father perseverating about it during the Fifties. It has the advantage of being scary, true (several thousand years from now), and not attributable to human actions. So it's no surprise that climate change deniers love to invoke the next ice age as a reason to keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere.
For example, at a cynical outfit called Winningreen, described on its website as
a campaign communications company founded on the principle that conservative positions can win, even on issues thought to be the property of the other side. We do this by selling voters on your positions so elected officials can be confident they have the backing of their constituents.
we find retired physicist Gerald E. Marsh writing in 2012 about "The Coming of a New Ice Age"
http://www.winningreen.com/...
His conclusion:
So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely.
NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earth’s climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age?
We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp.
Yes, wonderful idea, let's have more of Katrina and Sandy, only worse. Climate instability won't cost us a dime!
More below.
This diary was prompted by a spotlighted diary on how climate change deniers think. I posted the following in a comment. (I'm rather new here. Still haven't figure out recs vs tips. Hope it's okay to cross-post.)
Yes, they deny (denial is one of their favorite defense mechanisms), but not because they can't bear to see a flaw in their world. To them, their world is full of flaws: perfidious, liberal, pocket-picking, treasonous, morally degraded, keep-government-out-of-my-Medicare flaws.
They deny because
a) they resist change in general (the psychological term is "rigid")
b) they distrust experts of all sorts -- suspicion is an aspect of the paranoid mentality, which arises from deep feelings of insecurity ("I'm not as good as you"), eg Sarah Palin who shifted from college to college without flunking out and gives (to me, anyway) a clear sense that if any professor at any point had admired her academic efforts, she would have stayed put; also because experts often turn out to be wrong (margarine, anyone?), they have plenty of reinforcement for this attitude
c) they hate to accept blame for anything (again, the insecurity), and the central concept of anthropogenic climate change is that it's our/their fault.
To reach these people, ridicule will not work. What might work is an approach that
a) blames someone else (eg not drivers of SUV's, but foot-dragging by scientists who could have produced more efficient car engines thirty years ago if they wanted to)
b) invokes the past as a guide to the future, but not in a haranguing way (eg look at the air Thomas Jefferson breathed; look at the stars Benjamin Franklin saw; look at the game that was out there for Daniel Boone to hunt)
c) features real-life non-scientists and self-admitted non-experts who have "seen the light" (because of military service on X island or losing their home to Katrina or Sandy, etc).
To this I should add, they will use science or pseudoscience when it flouts intellectual consensus or established wisdom.
For example my father, who believed (or more accurately, wanted to believe) himself smarter than any doctor, was a big advocate of laetrile, the magical extract of apricot pits. He opposed food additives until they became standard grocery-store fare, then switched to opposing the liberal organic farming ethos. Despite its acceptance by his Catholic church, he opposed evolution but believed that alien astronauts explained some events in the bible.
Anything that doesn't make them responsible for badness and mocks anointed experts.