If You Need To Know How To Talk To Your Climate Denying Uncle Pete On Thanksgiving, Here’s Your Advice

If you thought this whole advice for Liberals on “how to act like a civil adult on Thanksgiving” thing was just a miniscule thing, au contraire. I have numerous articles saved to Pocket, and may never get around to them all. Here we have the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists driving drunkily down the road

Thanksgiving advice: How to deal with climate change denying Uncle Pete

“Birds of a feather flock together,” so I am sure that nearly all of those reading this article accept the main findings of climate science. Yet many people don’t. Instead, they believe a variety of climate myths.

These include claims that the world isn’t warming; or if warming is occurring, it is natural and not human-caused; or volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than we humans do. I know none of you believes these myths, but it seems that almost everybody has an unpleasant relative–call him Uncle Pete–who comes to dinner. Pete spoils the family mood by making these false claims, which he found on talk radio or the Internet. I’ll tell you in a moment why some of the most frequently repeated claims are just plain wrong. I won’t have time to cover all of them, and I recommend the website skepticalscience.com for the whole story. It’s a collection of the most commonly heard climate myths, and why they are all dead wrong. Skepticalscience.com is your key to refuting your own Uncle Pete.

Oh, good, send people over to a heavily partisan website for confirmation bias and talking points to annoy your family (no mention of how to keep from going apoplectic when they point out you drove a fossil fueled vehicle to Thanksgiving dinner).

By burning fossil fuels, we humans have taken over the role of deciding what the climate in coming decades will be. We are no longer passive spectators in the global climate change pageant. We have become the actors. Science provides convincing evidence that the heat-trapping gases produced by human activities are the main cause of the warming observed in recent decades. This aspect of climate science is very firmly established, going back to definitive laboratory experiments in the 1850s. Those experiments showed that carbon dioxide and other gases, present in small quantities in the atmosphere, have powerful heat-trapping properties. In recent decades, the fingerprint of the observed warming, such as how it varies with altitude and geography and season, matches the pattern that we expect from adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. We’ve found the enemy. He is us.

Yet, strangely, members of the Cult of Climastrology mostly refuse to give up their own use of fossil fuels. Weird, eh?

For many skeptics or contrarians like Pete, the climate change issue is not a science topic at all. For Pete, it is simply an opportunity for the government, and liberals and environmentalists, to make rules and regulations, to interfere with markets, and to diminish the personal freedom of individuals. For Pete, it is just one more way for the authority of the state to control the lives of citizens. This view has nothing to do with science, and no argument based only on science can change it.

Interestingly, every single policy prescription from Warmists reinforces that this is all about government.

Uncle Pete has a high opinion of the free market.

Obviously, that makes Uncle Pete a hater and he wants to destroy the Earth. Let’s jump back a few paragraphs

There are similar convincing refutations of all the other common climate myths. That’s why many studies have shown that about 97 percent of the climate scientists who are most active in publishing research on climate change agree that the observed recent warming is real and serious and overwhelmingly human-caused.

If you’re trotting out “consensus”, particularly the massively debunked 97% schtick, you’ve shown that this is not science, it’s opinion.