Thoughts on global warming deniers

The data irrefutably establishes humans as the dominant driver of environmental change, which is something that should worry us all.

The scientific method has proved a remarkable tool for clarifying our view and enabling  us to develop an elaborate, objective consensus about how the world works.

It is unfortunate that a highly intelligent person such as yourself has no understanding of how science works or what constitutes a valid scientific theory. Your glorification of stupidity, and the refusal to think hard about real issues reiterates the deep chasm that separates those that face reality from those that  can't think, can't reason from evidence, and don't even know what would constitute evidence.

Babylonian astrologers thought the stars governed our fates, a thousand years ago Western societies were largely religious and prayed to the skies for their salvation, and all pre-science cultures accepted ideological insights for truth rather than tested knowledge. And the results: Pestilence, famine, disease, high infant mortality, slavery, institutionalized rape, genocide, and war, in other words, each human being engulfed in extreme suffering embedded in societies that lacked basic justice and liberty.

History teaches us that conservative, backward-looking movements often arise under conditions of economic stress. Consider how conservative elements in American religion and politics refuse to accept scientific knowledge, deride their opponents for being "reality based," and ask yourself, "could that ideology come to rule the most powerful nation on earth? and if it did, what would be the consequences for the world?"

Civilizations do fail. We have never yet seen one that hasn't. Gibbon, in describing the fall of Rome, spoke of "the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" and of "the triumph of barbarism and religion". As Rome collapsed, or in the Ming Empire or under the Abbasid Caliphate, the triumph of faith over reason played a large part in turning relative into absolute decline in living standards.

So. if we follow your path, before us we have a world which falls into apathy about gun murders, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy  decline, a new dark age, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of political and religious fundamentalism.  I prefer another path...one in which we take the science where it leads, and use our liberal democratic processes to honestly weigh potential actions against the social risks.