The contortion of logic that one must endure to embrace climate denial is no doubt difficult and mentally taxing, like living your life through a mirror where everything’s backwards and left is right, industry-paid is independent, political correctness is scientific, and up is down.
So we’re amused but not surprised to see the latest convoluted denier argument beginning to bubble up. We’ll let the Breitbart headline speak for itself: “The Climate Change Lobby Is Complicit In America’s Unpreparedness for Natural Disasters.”
The argument is as simple as it is stupid. Money spent on climate change research is a waste when it could be spent on adaptation and preparations instead. This makes sense only if one is in denial of the fact that climate research is what helps us understand and therefore prepare for what’s to come and, more obviously, that research informs how we adapt. How can we adapt for that which we do not know might happen?
But apparently Trump’s decision to revoke federal flood protections isn’t going to reduce preparations for the next flood. Apparently the GOP’s cuts to FEMA won’t reduce FEMA’s ability to manage emergencies. Apparently it’s the science that tells us to build for bigger storms in a warmer world that leaves us unable to adapt, and not Trump’s EPA ending a federal adaptation office. It’s spending on understanding how weather changes over time that is a problem, not Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Weather Service.
In the sense of a political attack, this makes some sense. As we’ve repeatedly pointed out in the past year, co-opting the language of the opposition to strip it of meaning is textbook propaganda. Emulate to undermine, and you’ve robbed the other side of their talking points.
But this argument of climate activists being the real problem also popped up in an even more bizarre fashion. Alan Carlin, WUWT regular guest poster whose claim to fame is that he was in the Sierra Club one time and worked for the EPA but is now a denier, suggests on his blog that by attempting to limit CO2 emissions, we’re making the next ice age that much worse.
Deniers appear unable to wrap their minds around that same sort of reasoning--making things worse--as it applies to warming and storms. Warmer water evaporates faster, and warmer air can hold more of that moisture. So as the planet warms, rainfall becomes more extreme and storms more intense. To deniers, this simple physics, known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, doesn’t apply, and instead they focus on the strawman of climate causing more hurricanes as opposed to worsening them. But the same reasoning--that human activities can magnify natural variability--is exactly what Carlin invokes to attack what he artfully calls the “Climate-Industrial Complex.”
Sounds like there’s a second “double C-word” that Pruitt’s political crony needs to censor while trying to blind our government to climate change: Clausius-Clapeyron.
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