A heated rant against deniers: Tom Toles

The great Tom Toles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, said to be the 48th most-powerful man in D.C. by one survey, has a nifty new website, complete with rants. Last Friday the heat got under his collar, and he turned on climate change deniers, who love warm winters, and see warm temps at that time as a good thing, even if is climate change related, but somehow forget the whole subject when it turns extra hot in the summer.

Like this month (temp map courtesy of Weather Underground):

 
Toles writes:

How long could I go before twisting this hot summer weather into some
screed about climate change? Apparently only this long. Deniers never
tire of this game: when it's cold in the winter, that's "evidence" about
climate trends, and when it's warm in the winter, they say "If this is
climate change, I'll take it!". So why should I be any different? But
there IS a difference. For deniers it's all a big game of scoring cheap
points.

For everyone else, the climate debate has been for decades now about
the degree of conclusiveness of the evidence, measured against the
practicalities of reducing carbon output. Now, the evidence is
massively supportive (the scientists' e-mail "conspiracy" has been
debunked, please be aware). But because the pro-carbon people are still
unprepared to reduce carbon in ANY meaningful way, they are cornered
into a position where they have to argue that there is NO compelling
evidence. And so that is the position they take.

So let me be the first to haul out the heavy artillery of WWII
analogies on this issue and call the climate legislation obstructionists
the Neville Chamberlains of the planet. We have SUV's in our time. If
there is a current issue on which people are absolutely discrediting
themselves, in a way that current science and future calamities will
hold them accountable for, this is it. "If this is responsibility, I'll
take it!" Well, you've got it.

The question some have asked is: Could there be lawsuits against oil companies to remedy that ducked responsibility? And could this be the reason that oilcos have cut funding to outright deniers?