Does this make Warmists “Climate Doomists”? The original title was Heartland Institute: Climate Change Conference “Optimism is the new denial”
(Slate) It’s tempting to find irony in the spectacle of hundreds of climate change deniers staging their convention amid a drought of historic proportions. But, as the conference organizers are quick to tell you, they aren’t actually climate change deniers. The majority of this year’s speakers readily acknowledge that the climate is changing. Some will even concede that human emissions are playing a role. They just think the solutions are likely to be far worse than the problem.
Most think Man plays a small role. Some, like Anthony Watts, believe Man plays a big role. We just don’t see the doom in Warmist prognostication.
“I don’t think anybody in this room denies climate change,†the Heartland Institute’s James M. Taylor said in his opening remarks Monday. “We recognize it, but we’re looking more at the causes, and more importantly, the consequences.†Those consequences, Taylor and his colleagues are convinced, are unlikely to be catastrophic—and they might even turn out to be beneficial.
Don’t call them climate deniers. Call them climate optimists.
OK. Will do. And we’ll call you bat shit crazy apocalypse believers, who whine about fossil fuels (linking of the fossil fuel industry is in paragraph 6) but won’t give them up yourselves.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the evidence on both sides is equal. There’s a reason the climate deniers are losing the scientific debate, and it isn’t because academia is better funded than the energy industry. All of which helps to explain how climate optimism might be a more appealing approach these days than climate denial. Models of how climate change will impact society and the economy are subject to far more uncertainty than the science that links greenhouse gas emissions to the 20th-century warming trend. The costs of mitigating those emissions are more readily grasped: higher energy bills, government spending on alternative energy projects, lost jobs at coal plants.
Except, as poll after poll shows, Warmists are losing the debate. Most want nothing to do with the Warmist solutions, and typically find that climate change is dead last or next to last in lists of concerns.
Have some fun reading the entire article. It really is a difference between people that are optimistic (Conservatives) and people who are always miserable and see the worst in everything (Progressives)
