The denialists you will always have with you

Reading up on the past I keep running into the present. In Indiana History: A Book of Readings, I came across the memoirs of Oliver H. Smith, including the story of the turning point in his run for Congress in 1826. His opponent, Judge John Test, inadvertently aroused the wrath of the same wingnut intelligentsia that takes pride in (a) debunking, and (b) not reading about climate change today:

We met in Allenville, Switzerland county, on one occasion. The whole country was there. The judge was speaking, and for the first time introduced the new subject of railroads. He avowed himself in favor of them, and said he had voted for the Buffalo and New Orleans road, and then rising to the top of his voice, 'I tell you, fellow-citizens, that in England they run the cars thirty miles an hour, and they will yet be run at a higher speed in America.' This was enough. The crowd set up a loud laugh at the expense of the judge. An old fellow, standing by me, bawled out, 'You are crazy, or do you think we are all fools; a man could not live a moment at that speed.' {103}

The disinformation machine

Joseph Romm at Gristmill immerses himself in the garbage heap that is the Wall Street Journal editorial page so that we don't have to. Besides pointing out the WSJ's failure to honestly characterize this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners (they are Al Gore and the multitude of scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Romm does a good job of making the point I have made in earlier incarnations of this blog: the reasoning process of the denialist conservatives and libertarians is backward. Since they disapprove of many of the solutions proposed for global warming, they pretend it's not a problem rather than acknowledge the clear and present danger, using every trick in the book to spread disinformation about the established science.

I repeat: They are not honest disputants. I have personal knowledge of this from reading Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's abusive book (blogged here), which I chose because it was promoted by Chicago's local denialist outfit, the Heartland Institute. No one could cherry-pick the refereed scientific literature as Singer and Avery do without knowingly committing intellectual perjury.