Stephen Lewandowsky has a new climate denial explainer that is both entertaining and illuminating. The title of the explainer references Alice (in Wonderland)'s trip Through the Looking Glass, and the piece uses Australian denier Ian Plimer as an example into the minds of deniers. Specifically, Lewandowsky investigates how deniers' conspiracy theory-thinking leads them into the trap of making mutually exclusive statements as they attempt to say whatever sounds best in rejecting climate science.
The piece opens with two quotes from Plimer's book. The first says, "CO2 keeps our planet warm," and the other says, "Temperature and CO2 are not connected." These are followed by the classic Looking Glass quote that "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." But how, exactly, can both of Plimer's contradictory statements be true? Clearly Plimer, like other deniers, fails to present an intellectually coherent argument, because there IS no intellectually coherent argument for climate denial.
Other contradictions that the explainer covers in depth include: low climate sensitivity today, while the past climate was supposedly highly sensitive to change; that we can't measure the climate accurately enough to say it's warming but we can measure that it's stopped warming; and that there's no consensus, but those that dissent are brave heroes bucking the mainstream.
If that sounds like madness, that's because it is. To quote the Chesire Cat, when it comes to Denierland, "we're all mad here."