The climate around climate change is nasty. And no, I don’t mean the two days of snow that the East coast is getting, and no, I don’t mean the increasing drought that is happening around the world. What I mean is the political and editorial climate around the theory/fact of climate change.

A scathing op-ed in the Washington Times today takes aim at anyone who believes in climate change with this title:

“EDITORIAL: Global Warming snow job. ‘Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science. ‘”

The editorial goes on to say that much of the information in the IPCC is fraudulent and just plain invented, of course referring to the now infamous prediction of the possibility that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This one is a doozy, as it really does seem to have been blindly taken from a news story in the late 90’s and now everyone is trying to distance themselves from it as much as possible with words like “misquoted” or “out of context”. Point being, it was an incorrect prediction. Does that devalue the science behind climate change? Absolutely not.

Everything the editorial goes on to blast are real world applications of the climate change numbers or predictions. While we do need to make predictions and look into the future based on what has been happening, the “science” part of climate change science is what we can answer through direct observation. And with that, things are melting on the poles and holes are opening in the atmosphere. The climate is changing. A great comment on the editorial came from John_Engelman:

“A year ago last Christmas people were walking around Washington, DC in their shirt sleeves. You need to distinguish between climate change and weather differences.” The weather itself will still swing from warm (like Washington DC last year) to crazy cold (like Washington DC this year), but the climate is changing, shifting.

It’s interesting that much of the climate change denial movement comes from the Republican/conservative/Christian camp, where core beliefs like Christianity and Capitalist Economics are both based on assumptions and world-views that cannot be proven through pointing at things in the real-world, or could be “disproven” by pointing at something specific. What I mean is, you don’t prove that “God” is evil by pointing to a war and saying, then why did this happen? And you don’t prove that capitalism doesn’t work by pointing to a failed entrepreneur and saying it didn’t work for this guy. The snowstorm on the East coast is anecdotal evidence- not scientific.

IPCC report lead Mr. Pachauri called climate change deniers and report critics: "people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder. I hope that they apply [asbestos] to their faces every day."

Harsh. But it shows the level of frustration on the side of those who published the report.

This battle isn’t going anywhere. But neither is the necessity that we start doing something about it right now.

Photo Credit: wwwworks (via Flickr under CCL)