Warm and getting warmer.
The story above can tell us all we need to know about climate change deniers. And what's more, it can tell us all we need to know about conservatives and science.
There was a scientist at Berkeley (of all places) who challenged the science of climate change. He is physicist and was skeptical of the rigor of climatologist. So the Koch Brothers funded his research to challenge the conventional wisdom about global warming. One denialist said in March, "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong."
You have one guess as to what happened.
See, Richard Muller, the physicist, was simply skeptical of the science. So he ran the numbers himself - he's a numbers guy as a physicist - and said, "Wow, these are pretty solid."
And faster than a polar bear can drown in open ocean, all the denialists drop Muller and his science.
Muller was skeptical, so he looked at the evidence. The evidence convinced him. That's the way objective reasoning is supposed to work. But conservatives seem as a group to have abandoned objective reasoning.
Deficits too high? Cut taxes.
Not enough jobs? Cut spending.
Globe getting warmer? Drill, baby, drill.
Of course, Americans as a whole have no idea how to reason objectively either, so they won't pay any penalty for basically returning to an intellectual framework that once burned witches at the stake.
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