Oh so innocently, I perused SFGate.com to see tonight’s news. The first story that stopped me: Dan Fogelberg, the singer/songwriter whom I believe had a central Illinois connection, died of prostate cancer, age 56. OK, that hits kind of close to home. And there’s an AP story on the winter storm that just blew through the Midwest and on into New England: Storm Buries Northeast, Causes 3 Deaths (the headline writer, or whoever, might want to take a refresher on what states constitute the Northeast, as the story bundles news from Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan into the mix). Editorial nagging aside, I noted there are 69 reader comments appended to the story. Sixty-nine. For a weather piece.
It appears the flat-earthers, Lindburgh Baby conspiracists and folks sporting aluminum-foil headgear have turned out in force to taunt enviros and Gore-ites and Bay Area liberals (if those three categories can actually be untangled) about global warming. Their thinking is: See? Look at that drift out their! Look at the ice on the pond! Look at that icicle dangling from my nose! Where’s your climate catastrophe now, wise guys?
OK, they’re pretty funny as far as they go. One guy writes, tongue in cheek: “Bushco Nazi big oil conspiritors created this situation in order to drive up the cost of heating oil and to trick the ignorant masses back east that they need to mine coal for survival!!” Heh. Beyond the chuckle, though, it’s nothing more than the same anti-scientific perversity that makes Americans more likely to believe in Genesis than in Darwin. What a strange, strange group we are. No nation anywhere is so dependent on the fruits of science — Dan Fogelberg, and every other cancer patient, could have told you about that — and none has such a well-organized opposition and obdurate resistance to the very idea of science and research. It’s a puzzler.
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