So say Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles
The conservative retreat on Climate Change has at last begun
After close to three decades of ignoring and/or actively subverting climate science, conservatives have finally been forced to acknowledge the face-lashing climate facts that are now afflicting the planet.  The accumulating evidence of melting glaciers, drought, record wildfires, rising oceans and devastating flooding, has finally dislodged the permafrost  position conservatives have clung to on climate science.
It is the watershed moment of retreat on this issue, which has seen an ever-quickening tap dance of clever positions, from ‘there isn’t any evidence’, to ‘climate change will be a good thing’, to ‘scientists are all corrupt and actively perpetrating a worldwide conspiracy’.
That link goes to National Affairs, a nominally Conservative magazine which virtually no Conservatives ever cite. Heck, it’s traffic isn’t all that much more than my little spot on the web. And I don’t have big moneyed Republicans paying me nor dumping money into my site.
Anyhow, apparently one article from National Affairs means everything is changing! And we get a cartoon!
Huh
During the cold winter, the eastern US was "just one percent of the planet"
But on Christmas Eve, it defined the global climate.— Tony Heller (@Tony__Heller) December 31, 2015
Yup. When something weather related happens in a part of the US, like the East coast heat, we’re doomed from ‘climate change.’ When it’s snowy and cold, well, then it doesn’t matter. Of course, they’ll also blame cold and snow on ‘climate change.’
It’s inevitable that as the evidence pulls the less ideological conservatives away from the cult that they would need to find a face-saving way to recognize the truth.
Recall that before the 2008 Presidential campaign that the Republican Party recognized that the Earth was warming and we needed to address it, but the Tea Party movement changed all that.
Not sure what the Denier King (tony watts) will do, but over the next couple of years his acolytes like William and the odious jimhoft will slink away from global warming topics as if they never typed an untruth about climate.