I understand the motivation of many climate change skeptics. There are the oil people. There are the scientists paid by the oil people. There are the car company CEOs, who thought that making fuel-efficient vehicles would somehow put them out of business. (Whoops, their bad.) There are the people at Fox News and on the Wall Street Journal editorial page who'd be out of a job if they weren't climate change skeptics. I understand these people.
The ones I don't understand are the run-of-the-mill media hacks across the country who spread this nonsense. What's in it for them? They're not getting a piece of the Exxon-Mobil profits (I don't think). No one is specifically paying them to be knuckleheads (I don't think). Meanwhile, two American cities have been completely wiped out by hurricanes in the last five years. The Great Lakes are being drained because they're not freezing nearly as much in the winter. Droughts have plagued island countries (more affected by changes in ocean temperatures) from Ireland, to Cyprus, to Australia. The desert has crept into Spain. African insects are now flourishing in southern Italy. European ski resorts at lower elevations in the Alps now have to make snow to survive.
Can someone explain this to me? Are they all trying to audition for Fox or the Wall Street Journal? What's going on here? Why is it a liberal versus conservative thing to admit the obvious, here? Even China acknowledges the causes of climate change. They just don't care to do much about it. To me that's a much more intellectually honest approach.
