These days, it’s hard for us to find fresh angles and arguments to tell you about. Denial’s not exactly a creative or innovative approach, after all. But that’s not stopping deniers from growing increasingly outrageous, ignorant and unhinged.
So when we saw Daily Kos blogger WCWatch’s headline from last week,“Mark Levin just made possibly the most hilarious climate denial argument ever,” we were a bit skeptical. Turns out WCWatch is right and Levin delivers. As WCWatch recaps, Levin asked listeners of his radio program last week what great scientists of the past had in common, listing out Aristotle, Faraday, Galileo, Tesla, Newton, Pasteur, Edison, Einstein and someone named “Archie Medeez” (who sounds like he was pretty good at math). The answer? They never talked about climate change.
Why did these scientists, according to Levin, not talk about climate change? “Because ladies and gentlemen, man-made climate change is not about science,” Levin crows. “It’s not about evidence. It’s not about knowledge. It’s not about facts. It’s about an ideology, imported in the United States from Europe, like Marxism itself.”
Someone may want to let Levin know that the idea that people who lived millennia before the birth of the scientific method’s development in the Enlightenment, centuries before the industrial revolution and decades before the rampant growth of oil and gas use didn’t talk about climate change is hardly surprising. Add the stretch of climate change’s apparent importation from Europe (like Marxism) and yeah, this might be the most hilarious denial argument ever.
Levin wasn’t the only one last week to bizarrely bring up communism vis-a-vis climate denial for no real reason. In a Wednesday post on WUWT, Christopher Monckton describes his recent trip to Moscow’s Russian Cities’ Climate Forum. There, he labels climate scientists and advocates as “climate Communists,” or “climate Nazis,” or even “reptilian Communists” in his post about how the Russians aren’t buying climate “communism.”
Monckton describes a former UNFCCC negotiator as a “reptilian bureaucrat... as if he had crawled out from under a stone (which, in a very real sense, he had).” When Monckton serves him a fit of anti-renewable rage, apparently the “reptile from the UNFCCC slithered out and slunk away, never to be seen again.” (We’re wondering in what “very real sense” had this lizardman crawled out from a stone? Was his hotel room in a basement? Does Monckton literally believe this man emerged, green and scaly, from a subterranean lair?)
The post continues with a tirade against bike-sharing and a claim to have supposedly debunked a 120 year old error of climate science in just 10 minutes. Accordingly, it’s hard to know if Monckton is intentionally using hyperbolic rhetoric and dehumanizing the climate concerned to justify further irrational opposition, or if he has simply lost his marbles and is going full Infowars.
Either way, a hearty thanks to Levin and Monckton for proving that, despite decades of rehashing the same old myths, creativity is still alive and well in the deniersphere. Now excuse us please, we have to go bask in the sun to maintain our body temperature, while trying find out what Descartes once said about Net Neutrality. Our best guess: “I link, therefore I am.”
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