That arrogance does not, however, come from the scientists behind the 97 percent of peer-reviewed papers that say civilization's emissions of greenhouse gases are driving climate change. Nor from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who are
95 percent certain the human activities are causing climate change.
Rather it is the lethal arrogance of the shills for the fossil fuels fools who have, over the past quarter-century, done the bidding of their paymasters in twisting the facts about climate change—when they haven't been fabricating "facts" outright.
They started out, some of them, claiming even that the whole greenhouse gas theory was bogus. Over time they've moved through various levels of denial: climate change isn't happening, seasons aren't being altered, sea levels aren't rising; it's happening but it's not a big deal and humans aren't causing it; it's happening but its impacts are minor and far in the future; it's happening but it will open up beneficial new commercial opportunities like growing food crops farther north; it's happening but it's too expensive to do anything about it and trying to prevent it from getting worse will kill jobs. Et cetera, ad nauseam. There has been the occasional step backward in the progression of denial, too, as with the claims that there's been a "pause" or "hiatus" in warming, something scientists say is simply not the case when the entire atmospheric-oceanic system is taken into account.
Now Mr. Jeb Bush might seem on the surface not to be among the worst of the deniers. His Wednesday remarks seem to show him trying to straddle the issue:
"I don't think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It's convoluted," he said at a house party in Bedford, New Hampshire.
"For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you," he continued. "It's this intellectual arrogance that now you can't have a conversation about it, even. The climate is changing. We need to adapt to that reality."
But such a remark makes him no better than Republican James Inhofe, the Senate snowball tosser who has repeatedly claimed, including in his ridiculous book, that climate change is a liberal hoax. Even Inhofe has moved on from his original stance that the climate isn't changing at all to agreeing that it
is changing but that humans aren't the cause of it. Inhofe has said: "My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
There's more on this below the orange calligraphy.
It's always tempting to invoke "intellectual ignorance" when listening to such claptrap. But while some of the deniers in Congress, state legislatures and elsewhere surely are plain ignorant, many of them are not despite their public pronouncements. You just know they are smart enough to privately accept the science behind climate change, but it's politically or financially not in their interest to admit it. They're not ignorant, they're malignant.
In addition to his fuzzy denial, Bush proved Wednesday that he isn't really interested in adapting to climate change. He said that President Obama was wrong in his Coast Guard commencement address Wednesday to make climate change "the highest priority," a matter of national security. "The president's approach is, effectively, [to] reduce economic activity to lower our carbon footprint. That's not what he says, of course, but that's the result of his policies."
Now, it's true that the president's approach has its flaws. But Obama is head and shoulders above any past president in the matter. Jeb Bush's claims, on the other hand, are nonsense, although pretty much what one would expect from someone whose family fortune was built on fossil fuels. Switching to a zero-carbon-burning global economy will create jobs, tens of millions of them. Bush himself almost admits this, saying that Republicans should "embrace" science and innovation. But in trying to have it both ways, he demonstrates that it is not the science of climate change that is convoluted. Rather it is the message of the man who would like to be the third Bush occupying the White House. Whether that message is ignorant, arrogant or malignant is up to readers to decide.