Hot enough for you?

… It will be. Man, I thought this global-warming thing was gonna be a lot nicer; you know, palm trees in Boston and whatnot. But this is just gonna suck.

Speaking of which, at what point will the media and public consign global-warming deniers to the Crackpot Closet? I mean, it’s even getting harder to drum up some professor-payola.

Science historian Naomi Oreskes, addressed the inconvenient — but quite lonely — MIT global-warming denier Prof. Richard Lindzen:

To be sure, there are a handful of scientists, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, the author of the Wall Street Journal editorial, who disagree with the rest of the scientific community. To a historian of science like me, this is not surprising. In any scientific community, there are always some individuals who simply refuse to accept new ideas and evidence. This is especially true when the new evidence strikes at their core beliefs and values.

…A historical example will help to make the point. In the 1920s, the distinguished Cambridge geophysicist Harold Jeffreys rejected the idea of continental drift on the grounds of physical impossibility. In the 1950s, geologists and geophysicists began to accumulate overwhelming evidence of the reality of continental motion, even though the physics of it was poorly understood. By the late 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics was on the road to near-universal acceptance.

Yet Jeffreys, by then Sir Harold, stubbornly refused to accept the new evidence, repeating his old arguments about the impossibility of the thing. He was a great man, but he had become a scientific mule … The scientific debate was over.

And that’s what’s really the problem here. It’s not science, it’s good old-fashioned cognitive dissonance: Changing their beliefs to accord to reality would require carving a big chunk out of their egos. It’s not getting any easier for them day by day. Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee James Inhofe (R-OK) is going down with the ship. Andrew Sullivan musters at least a “1%” possibility that it’s real — but gosh, it’s ever so complicated and hard to figure out, gee whiz; and the blogosphere is just chock-full of folks who cannot disentangle their own conservatism from the fuel line for Republican electoral victories.

How does one get these folks to climb down? Unfortunately, the consensus is that there’s a little too much Al Gore in the Al Gore movie, although it’s certainly provoking a discussion. Just keep hittin’ away, I guess.

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