Inventing Reality

MOST REPUBLICANS and conservatives don't believe in climate change, or say they don't. Maybe deep down some of them understand that climate change is real, but don't want to admit it. Most of them are absolutely certain that climate change is a hoax. Some of them accept the fact of global warming, but insist that it has nothing to do with human activity. Those who so insist are remarkable in that not only do they know for certain that human activity has nothing to do with climate change, they also happen to know exactly what is causing it. Its utterly amazing that these people know all this, because none of them has an education in science, and many of them have no education beyond high school, if that. And yet, they know more about science and reality than all the scientists in the world, and all the professors of science at all the world's great universities, nearly all of whom tell us, emphatically, that climate change is real, is caused by human activity, and that we must act now to reverse it, or die. climate change deniers conveniently ignore basic science in favor of their personal fantasy, a fantasy in which humans have nothing to do with climate change, and in which there is nothing humans can do about it. An amazing level of arrogance and ignorance is exhibited by climate change deniers. Their most common refrain is that even if the climate is changing, its merely a natural occurrence, since the climate on Earth is constantly changing, and always has been. What they omit is that even though this is true, there is nothing in this fact preventing humans from influencing the climate, by changing the chemical content of the Earth's atmosphere, which is exactly what is happening. Some of the more creative deniers claim that the sun is changing, fluctuating in its power energy output, and that this is causing climate change, and that climate change is occurring on every other planet in the solar system as a result. This, of course, is pure bullshit. These imaginative climate deniers ignore the fact that there are thousands of scientists who study the sun constantly, and measure everything about it, and would tell us is the sun's output were fluctuating. Solar scientists assure us that it is in fact not. As you probably already know, this fact doesn't faze ardent climate change deniers, who much prefer their own little fantasy world, over which they have complete control, to the real one, over which they have no control. We reject the truth, said Goethe, only because we fear we might perish if we accepted it. Climate change deniers, always the conservatives, are terrified of what might happen if they admitted the truth about climate change: that the liberals were right all along, and that a massive and fundamental set of changes must be made, immediately, to our economic and industrial systems. For conservatives, change is blasphemy, and so too, therefore, is climate change.