Charles Krauthammer is clueless on climate science: A drinking game

By Lindsay Abrams
25 February 2014 (Salon) – Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer published a head slapper of a column last week, in which the conservative pundit managed to spew an enormous number of misinformed, misleading claims, all couched in this “disclaimer” of an opening graf:

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

The column already received a deserved takedown in the Post’s own Op-Ed pages, courtesy of his colleague Stephen Stromberg. The same day it was published, coincidentally, protesters with CREDO and Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Post’s D.C. offices demanding that the paper stop publishing Op-Eds that spread misinformation about the science of climate change. But prominent climate scientist Michael Mann doesn’t think Krauthammer’s chicanery is worth taking that seriously. “[Krauthammer’s] commentary is a veritable laundry list of shopworn talking points,” Mann writes over at LiveScience, “so predictable now in climate change denialist lore that one can make a drinking game out of it.” What makes this great is that’s exactly what Mann proceeds to do (emphases his): His cry that it is “anti-scientific” to declare climate change a “fact?” A swig of vodka to start things out. [The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has concluded that “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities , and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.”] [more]