Strange Bedfellows, Dissing My Religion

LOOKING UP AT MY FRIEND, who stands six foot eight, loudly I proclaimed: "climate change is my religion! I believe in it fervently!", or something like that. Dismissively, my friend held his right hand out, palm down, and made a roller coaster motion, up and down. The message was, clearly: "the weather is always changing, and it has nothing to do with human activity." So clear was this message thea my friend didn't even feel the need to augment it with any spoken words. A simple gesture of the hand, to refute the entire scientific establishment. This is, of course, the standard conservative argument. Since the climate changes without human help, humans are not helping it change. Humans have no environmental impact, since nature is so very much larger than we. Yeah, well, try telling that to a passenger pigeon. Problem is, you won't find one. We, the human race, killed them all off, billions of them, with the last one dying in a Cincinatti zoo in 1920. It seems we can kill off billions of animals, can set lake Erie on fire, and can turn the atmosphere above Beijing into a smoky smoggy unbreathable mess, but cannot cause climate change. Meanwhile, thousands of very well trained scientists tell us that human induced climate change is real. Is it possible that these scientists, the entire scientific community, is aware that climate changes naturally, with or without human interference, and that they took this into consideration when they made their studies? Or, are scientists unaware of natural climate change, while conservatives with high school educations, like my six foot eight inch friend, are aware of it? What strange bedfellows thoughtlessness and arrogance make, yet, how frequently they lie together!