I'm not a scientist, but...

I know the world is only 6,000 years old

The theory of evolution is wrong

Dinosaurs and humans coexisted

Pumping toxic chemicals into the air, land and water is no big deal

I know more about women’s reproductive issues than women or doctors

Man-made climate change is a hoax

Too much taxpayer money is spent on bogus scientific research

Homosexuality is unnatural

Sometimes God punishes people through natural disasters

There is no other life in the universe

Noah could get all those animals on a boat because...God

The disastrous legacy of climate change deniers

Yesterday The Nation published a list of the ten top donors to climate change deniers in Congress. It’s the usual suspects we’ve come to expect, the Koch’s, Exxon Mobile, General Electric, and assorted other villains.

The thing about this that I find most troubling is the absolute disregard the people who authorize these donations have for their own families. They clearly don’t care that they are condemning their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren to lives on a dangerously toxic and unpredictable planet. Everything that we are just beginning to experience now — rising sea levels, severe temperatures, droughts, ever more powerful storms, species of animals dying off — will only increase as the years go by. The only conclusion a person can come to is that money is more important to them than their families.

Let’s say you own a home and you have it inspected. The inspector tells you that termites have been eating at the foundation of the house, and that if you don’t have them exterminated soon, the house will eventually collapse. If you’re Charles Koch, not only do you refuse to have the pests exterminated because it’s too expensive, you then give the damaged house to your children in your will. What kind of human being would do that?

It’s difficult to fathom such greed and callousness. These people didn’t get where they are by being gullible idiots, so it’s impossible for me to believe that they don’t know climate change is real. They are cynical capitalists who worship money over everything else. They have no allegiance to a country, a religion, an ideology or even their own family. Money is their god, and it’s destroying the planet.

There’s more to climate change denial than semantics

I’m trying to sort out my feelings after reading an article from the October 1 edition of New York Magazine, “Psychologists are Learning How to Convince Conservatives to Take Climate Change Seriously.”

The crux of the article is that because liberals and conservatives see the world in vastly different ways, we have to craft the message of man-made climate change in a certain code that appeals to a conservative’s deep-rooted biases. Facts alone are not enough. The author and the psychologists he interviews point out more than several times that liberals are to blame for not knowing how to talk to conservatives about this important issue.

As someone who works in marketing, I know all about crafting messages for target audiences. It’s what we do. So at that level the argument makes some sense. Based on background, education, age, gender, etc., people will have different responses to the same message. A message that appeals to me as a liberal will probably not go over so well with red-state evangelical Christians. I get that.

The part of the argument I struggle with is that we are facing a worldwide disaster that is going to have an adverse impact on every living thing, and we must act now to try and reverse its affects. To me, it’s as if I see a tornado bearing down on my Uncle Al’s house and I run in to tell him that he and his family are in danger, but he does nothing because I’m a lying socialist big-government Democrat. I’m left with two choices. Leave them to the mercy of the tornado or physically drag them out of the house. There’s no time to argue or dream up a more appealing message for my conservative kin. Action, one way or another, is required.

The article starts from the baseline that man-made climate change is real, and that those people with an active, functioning brain understand this, but goes on to argue that we (liberals) need to expend energy and time dealing with a group of stubborn, corporate-backed children who refuse to take the threat seriously.

Historically, America has faced this situation many times before. We fought a civil war because we could not as a country reach common ground on slavery. We pulled conservatives kicking and screaming through women’s suffrage, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, ending the war in Vietnam, and the era of environmental regulations, and we very well may have to do it again.

I don’t know. Maybe repackaging the climate change message will work with the average conservative, but the money people behind the deniers, the Koch’s and Adelson’s and Waltons, will not be so easily dissuaded, because their motivation is even more powerful than conservative bias. It’s about the bottom line.

America’s climate change deniers are putting hundreds of millions at risk

Interesting article at Daily Kos, Republican science denial – a clear and present danger to U.S.National Security, that illustrates clearly the tremendous price this country and the rest of the world will pay as a result of Republican denial of man-made climate change. The author argues that Republican inaction on climate change represents a clear and present danger to our national security as more and more people around the world become displaced from their homes and communities by rising seas.

The author raises a very serious question — what can be done about elected officials who stand in the way of solving a major national and international calamity? — but then backs away from any discussion of the politically explosive answers. What would you do with someone who represents a clear and present danger to our national security?

The Republican’s climate change denial is putting the entire planet at peril. How do we solve this? Everyone in America is entitled to their opinion, as wacky as it might be, but here we have a case where science denial could cost human lives and will certainly cause pain and suffering for tens of millions and harm the economies of many countries, including our own. Wars and revolts are a certain outcome of inaction on climate change as displaced populations due to rising seas move to higher ground.

Many scientists are saying we’ve crossed the Rubicon and our chances to turn things around are diminishing day by day. A virtual handful of science deniers in Congress and the Senate are doing everything they can to prevent legislation from passing that will attempt to deal with climate change. After the upcoming mid-term elections their may be even more knuckle-draggers in Washington. Obama doesn’t seem to have the strength or will to work around these human obstacles. What can we do?