Four Simple Truths to Advance in Your Dialogue with Those in Denial

...there are four simple truths to bear in mind -- repeat them to yourself when you are at a loss, and articulate them at every opportunity to those who are still avoiding reality:

The evidence continues to mount, and the case is compelling.

There is a clearly defined and realizable alternative to the paralyzing triad of apathy, despair and complicity.

The way forward demands that the governments, industries and financial institutions of the great nations take responsibility and lead, and so far they are not doing so.

Meanwhile, the delusional denial and wanton dissemination of disinformation continues.

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Even the Fat-Cats are beginning to realize that Emperor Cheney is nuts.

Brett Arends at AOL Money & Finance

The oil-based energy policies usually associated with Vice President Dick Cheney have just come under scathing attack. There's nothing remarkable about that, of course -- except the person doing the attacking.

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham -- Cheney's own investment manager. "What were we thinking?' Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data," Grantham's philippic adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.

[...]

The irony is that this isn't, or shouldn't be, a partisan issue. Grantham singles out the Ford administration for his strongest praise on environmental matters. Everyone since, of both parties, has been a failure, he concludes. "The past 26 years have been such a wasted opportunity," Grantham writes. "This country had previously shown leadership in this field. President Ford got us off to a running start in energy efficiency... With a succession of President Fords, we would have ended up as an environmental leader and a great model."

I would love to know what President Ford's former chief of staff thinks of that.

His name? Richard B. Cheney.

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Global Climate Change, even the scientists who disagreed now agree. It's coming!

Carl at Simply Left Behind

The smartest quote I've seen about global warming is in this article:

"Hell, we buy fire insurance based on a 1 per cent chance," [Professor Stephen Schneider, a climate consultant to the US government for more than 30 years] said. "If we're going to be risk averse … we cannot dismiss the possibility of potentially catastrophic outliers and that includes Greenland and West Antarctica [ice sheets breaking up], massive species extinctions, intensified hurricanes and all those things. "There's at least a 10 per cent chance of that. And that to me for a society is too high a risk … My value judgement when you're talking about planetary life support systems is that 10 per cent, my God, that's Russian roulette with a Luger."

More at My Left Wing

I'm done trying to explain to every subscriber of National Review exactly why it is that thickening of the center of the Antarctic ice sheet is actually evidence of global warming, rather than a refutation. I'm sick of laying out the evidence once again why this isn't just a "natural fluctuation."

So I'll tell you what I'm going to do next: make them defend themselves to me, using the 1% doctrine.

For those of you who don't know what the "1% doctrine" is, allow me to explain: it's supposedly the foreign policy doctrine conceived by Dick Cheney and can be explained as follows:

In his heralded new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis.

Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' ... Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."

[...]I'm done being scientific and rational. I think it's time to operate on the "fear" principle instead. After all: if your average Republican can continue to justify spending $500 billion and the lives of over 3,000 American soldiers to supposedly justify averting the 1% risk of another September 11th, how much more, then, should we all be willing to spend--or perhaps even sacrifice our lives?--to avert the possibility of seeing Ground Zero under water?

[...]From now on, the next time I hear a conservative lament the effect that the Kyoto protocol, or raising CAFE standards, or any other such admission of responsibility, would do to our economy, I won't try to argue back. I'll just say:

I'd like to see how well the NYSE performs underwater.