The Attack on Climate-Change Science
Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century

Awesome post by Bill McKibben, embedded in another post, comparing the climate denialist tactics with those of OJ’s defense team, and why so many people are buying the argument.

If anything, they [the defense team] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

I also thought this was especially good:

Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

The feedback problem here is that since they have money, they can buy politicians, who are happy to conclude that global warming is a myth and confound legislation meant to rectify the situation.