And yet it moves.

63 million Americans were fooled by a con man and they don't even know it.  Their Dear Leader is fooled time and again.  If only all of them understood something that is fundamental: "nature cannot be fooled."

Scientists have always worried that nature cannot be fooled, which is why some of them spent a lot of their time, energy, and money worrying about the next global pandemic.  Viruses abound in nature--I read somewhere that there are more than 500 strains of viruses in bats alone!--and they cannot be easily fooled by humans.  They do what they do in order to survive and prosper, just like any other life form does.

But then the 63 million couldn't care about science.  They actively engage in denying the very science that has made their lives also fantastic.

They denied, and continue to deny, the global climatic changes that have happened because of human actions over the past 200 years.

They denied, and continue to deny, the natural selection and evolution, and, therefore, the idea of mutation that makes possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans.

Nature cannot be fooled.

Now, 7.8 billion humans are terrified of a virus that we cannot see.

In this blog, and elsewhere, I have long been worried about the willful ignorance of the ideological crackpots who are adamant deniers of scientific understanding.  Every once in a while, some of those deniers have exhausted me (like here) by trying to debate on this issue--and this was not the kind of time-wasting that I like.

My faith in science is not like the blind faith that the 63 million--including this person--have in their Dear Leader.  My faith in science is based on logic and evidence.  The facts--not the alternative facts that the 63 million believe.

In my case, the faith is tested every day--the scientific method doesn't care for holy cows.

the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.” You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out. You have faith in your doctor because, presumably, she has treated you and others successfully, and you know that what she prescribes is tested scientifically.

I wouldn't deny the evidence in front of me that the science-denying maniacs are in control of our lives.  But, this is not the first time that science-deniers have held the power.  It used to be way worse.

Thinkers like Galileo learnt from the experiences in the past and understood how important it was for scientists to be political in order to make sure that science trumps denial.

There’s an old belief that truth will always overcome error. Alas, history tells us something different. Without someone to fight for it, to put error on the defensive, truth may languish. It may even be lost, at least for some time. No one understood this better than the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei.

Therefore, the "scientists putting their careers, reputations, and even their health on the line to educate the public can take heart from Galileo, whose courageous resistance led the way."

Those amongst us who have faith in science may have lost a battle or two, but we shall win the war against deniers.

The market speaks. But the deniers can't hear!

One can be in denial forever.  But, eventually, one has to face the truth, and accept it.  Such a day of reckoning for the deniers of climate change, aka tRump's toadies, might arrive sooner than they think.

This reckoning will not happen because they will voluntarily admit to the reality.  Nor will the message be delivered to them by their churches.

Instead, their almighty dollar will beat the crap out of them.

If the coming climate-related business crises will have one positive side effect, it’s that acute financial losses are likely to force policy changes in a way that environmental damage on its own has not. As one commenter on a recent Wall Street Journal article about PG & E. put it: “When capitalists decide the scientists are right, then the free market will adjust accordingly.”

They can complain all they want about science and government and Europeans, but the market will make them see Jesus!

California's PG&E is already suffering from the consequences and "would be filing for bankruptcy protection as a result of costs related to recent wildfires in the state."  It is the mere beginning.  The reality of climate change is also reflected in the real estate industry:

“The market is already reacting,” First Street Executive Director Matthew Eby said. “There’s no longer a conversation of what sea-level rise will do in 2050 or 2100.”

How is it reacting?

Sea-level rise has cost homeowners on the East and Gulf coasts nearly $16 billion in property value as floods and the threat of flooding drive some buyers away, according to a study released this week.
Analysts at the nonprofit First Street Foundation in Brooklyn studied millions of residential home sales in 17 states from Maine to Alabama and found that coastal property values were rising at a slower rate in flood-prone areas than in areas that did not flood.

What is holding the market back from a full-fledged reaction to climate change and, therefore, from delivering a blow to denialism? A "focus by policymakers in Washington on making changes that could actually turn things around."

“People in this field say, ‘We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve the problem,’ ” Usher said. Our politicians, however, “don’t have the willingness to do something. That’s where we are.”

There are a few politicians willing to do something; cue the Green New Deal!

To the GOP, denial is nothing but a river in Egypt!

I have blogged enough about climate change, which is all the more why I cannot understand how the maniacal Republicans can continue to be in denial.  Two years ago, back in August 2015, in responding to this comment by a GOP loyalist, I wrote:

What is, therefore, tragic is this: even when we now know better, we seem to want to continue along the same path that we have been traveling for decades. And the esteemed leaders of your favored political party even believe that the problems are all nothing but figments of the liberal imaginations. It is beyond my abilities to comprehend how politicians who have tremendous influence over our lives can be such vehement deniers.

The GOP loyalists apparently do not care for anything other than electing one of their own to the Oval Office--humanity be damned!

And then there were mysterious visitors, who continued to spout their denialist comments (like here.)

Thus, we continue to fail to address climate change.

Is this failure to act the legacy our generation wants to leave for the generations yet to come?

Apparently even the destructive hurricanes and extreme heat and all the other data won't convince the denialists!

[The] most savage heat waves that we experience today will likely become routine in a matter of decades. The coastal inundation that has already begun will grow worse and worse, forcing millions of people to flee. The immense wave of refugees that we already see moving across continents may be just the beginning.
...
In Washington, progress on climate change has stalled. The administration has announced its intent to withdraw from the global Paris climate accord. And top Trump appointees insist that the causes of climate change are too uncertain and the scientific forecasts too unreliable to be a basis for action.

A school "lifer" like me from the old country, who returned to India after earning his credentials here in the US, warns that storms and heatwaves will worsen because of climate change, and that monsoons will become more chaotic.  "It’s a question of taking onus and preparing for the bad climate," Krishna concludes.

Do that. Or, the alternative is to simply put into practice the words of the GOP's patron-saint of skulldaggery: deny, deny, deny!

Help--I hate blogging about carbon! ;)

I concluded the last post with this:

I hate to think that my intellectual energy will be consumed by deniers :(

And then, after responding to the comments, I thought to myself, "hey, this is merely blogging.  I don't even have to do it.  It is not like I am getting paid anyway."

Meanwhile, it was Deepavali in the old country.  My mother, having recovered enough from the fracture that knocked her into inaction a year ago, on top of the deaths in the family for two years in a row that wiped out any celebration, apparently made two different sweets this time around.  And I get to blog about carbon?  Talk about coal in the stockings! ;)

Oh well, I fear it will be a long month before the climate talks come to an end!

In the comments to the last post, I referred to the carbon pricing that has not come to happen.  Of course, it is thanks to one major political party that shall not be named; all I can say is that the party's three-letter abbreviation begins with a G, ends with a P, and has an O in between ;)

Why that kind of an intense opposition to carbon pricing?  That comes down to a sub-group within that party.  The first part of this sub-group is the hot drink that Ramesh's favorite queen drinks from a cup with her pinky sticking out ;)

Back in 2014, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told the Times that any Republican Presidential candidate who supported a carbon tax or regulations “would be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process.” Based on their current positions (or lack thereof), the candidates seem to have received the message.

You perhaps are thinking, "come on, some of those party's leaders know better," right?  Yes, they did.  Guess what happened?  Here is an example:

In 2009, Bob Inglis, then a Republican representative from South Carolina, introduced H.R. 2380, or the “Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act,” an upstream carbon tax that would have used all revenue to reduce payroll taxes. In the 2010 primary, he was challenged by a Tea Party candidate and defeated.

You read that right--carbon revenue to reduce taxes, and the guy lost in the primary!

Oh, you want another example?

“In 2003, the leader in the Senate on climate change was John McCain. And, if you fast-forward to 2008, there wasn’t much debate on climate change, because then-Senator McCain and then-Senator Obama had almost identical, ambitious cap-and-trade proposals to tackle the problem.” Ryan Lizza has written in the magazine about what happened next. In short, a confluence of the Great Recession, garden-variety partisanship, and, finally, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill served to kill whatever momentum had built on the issue. ... (McCain was also challenged from the right that year, and subsequently backed away from climate policy.)

I suppose if Charlton Heston were alive, he would thunder in his awesomely impressive voice that we will be able to take that carbon only "from my cold, dead hands."  Or, maybe Clint Eastwood will talk to an empty chair about how is so happy that the chair is all carbon and the green hippies won't be able to that carbon away!

But then it is not merely the politicians.  Their think-tanks feed them stuff like this:

Benjamin Zycher, a resident scholar at the A.E.I. who works on energy and the environment, questioned the efficacy of any carbon tax or fee on future average temperatures. He poked holes in the historical temperature data, and wondered aloud whether it was “really an accident that the dominant effect of climate policy is an increase in energy costs in red states relative to blue ones.” (“Do not underestimate the power of wealth redistribution as a force driving policymaking in the Beltway,” he has written elsewhere, about the Obama Administration’s approach to climate-change policy.)

Such an intense opposition means that even Greg Mankiw--a Harvard economics guy, who chaired Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and then was Romney's adviser, is unable to influence a decent number of GOP leaders with stuff like this:

Sure, there are skeptics about the climate science behind these claims. But science is always a matter of probabilities, not certainties. Even a reasonable skeptic should be willing to embrace modest steps to curb carbon emissions.
Policy wonks like me have long argued that the best way to curb carbon emissions is to put a price on carbon. The cap-and-trade system President Obama advocates is one way to do that. A more direct and less bureaucratic way is to tax carbon. When polled, economists overwhelmingly support the idea.

To recap, it comes down to this: an overwhelming consensus among scientists is that we need to tackle the carbon that we are burning, and an overwhelming majority of economists support taxing carbon use.  Yet, we continue to have this discussion in these United States of America.  To borrow from Yakov Smirnoff, "America, what a country!"

The dangerous denialists. Especially in climate change.

Until recently, I checked with three Oregon newspapers on a daily basis: Register Guard, Statesman Journal, and The Oregonian.  Of course, I have authored op-eds at all three, though the most are only in the Register Guard.  These days, I rarely ever bother to find out what The Oregonian has to say, particularly in the opinion section--it almost always seems to have nothing substantive, which is shame given that it is published from Portland where the economic weight of the state is located.

Today was one of those rare days when I scanned through the opinions at the Oregonian.  The title of one piece there got my attention: Is 'climate change' really the world's most pressing problem?  It had a wonderful beginning too:

Famed Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman once described science as "the belief in the ignorance of experts." The very first scientific society, The Royal Society, adopted the motto: "Take nobody's word for it." Questioning is the stock-in-trade of scientists; it is the way we discover new things and the way we keep science honest. Without the ability to question conclusions, science degenerates into politics and pseudo-religion.

As a big time Feynman fan, I was hooked.  And as one who always advises students not to simply take anybody's word--including mine--I was certainly curious about the opinion.

Alas, after that it was all crap.  It turned out to be one of those climate-change denying pieces.  And, get this, the author "holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago's Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research."  Yep, a PhD from one of the most prestigious places for physics.  The very university that was home to Fermi and Chandrasekhar.

Questioning is, indeed, fundamental to science.  Scientists are skeptics.  However, we need to clearly and forcefully distinguish between skepticism and denialism.

In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

At some level, the skepticism and denialism might even look the same to a casual observer:

Surely few would willingly embrace the title of “denialist.” It sounds so much more rigorous and fair-minded to maintain one’s “skepticism.” To hold that the facts are not yet settled. That there is so much more that we do not know. That the science isn’t certain. The problem here, however, is that this is based not only on a grave misunderstanding of science (which in a sense is never settled), but also of what it means to be a skeptic. Doubting the overwhelming consensus of scientists on an empirical question, for which one has only the spottiest ideologically-motivated “evidence,” is not skepticism, it is the height of gullibility. It is to claim that it is much more likely that there is a vast conspiracy among thousands of climate scientists than that they have instead all merely arrived at the same conclusion because that is where they were led by the evidence.

That's what I wrote in my response, too, when a reader/commenter questioned my embrace of climate change:

Notice though being a skeptic does not mean that there [is] nothing definitive. As far as we know, the evidence is overwhelming that climate change is not only for real but that human activities--the burning of carbon--is the prime reason for it. Yes, cows farting methane adds, but sources like that contribute way less than what can be traced back to humans. Dismissing the evidence is not how a skeptic works. 

A skeptic does not dismiss the evidence, nor cherry-picks through it.  A denialist, on the other hand, rejects the evidence as if it was a result of "a vast conspiracy" among scientists.

When we cynically pretend to withhold belief long past the point at which ample evidence should have convinced us that something is true, we have stumbled past skepticism and landed in the realm of willful ignorance. This is not the realm of science, but of ideological crackpots. 

I suppose the deniers will be out in full force all the way to, and through, the upcoming climate talks.  I hate to think that my intellectual energy will be consumed by deniers :(