“The Antithesis”. Christmas Guest pudding from William McClenney, of a particularly turgid variety. If you can trudge through it all, let me know if I got this wrong…

William joins the long list of denialists who think they can argue that slow geological events in the past are equivalent to today’s rapid climate change. Not particularly original, nor particularly interesting.

His entertaining version of the “precautionary principle” is a take on an old denialist delaying tactic. What if, instead of trying to stabilize CO2 at what we think are natural levels, we should be raising it? The fatalist version of denialist “precaution” saves effort at the expense of everything else.

This paragraph particularly annoyed me for its fundamental anti-science:

“An astute reader might have gleaned that even on things which have happened, the science is not that particularly well settled. Which makes consideration of the science being settled on things which have not yet happened dubious at best.”

So every time we are able to improve accuracy of for example, an age estimate, we are in fact proving that science isn’t useful? Dumb.