Besides being the best political cartoonist on the subject of climate and the environment, and actually funny as well, Tom Toles publishes almost as many sketches as he does full-fledged cartoons, plus he has a fiery but smart blog in the Washington Post which he often talks about, yes, climate.
As in today’s The Sound of Ice Melting:
It’s pretty quiet. Have you noticed? The vast armies of climate denial have gone quiet. It is temporary.
For the longest time, the argument was not really with the science. The science was always very straightforward. 1) Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. 2) We are adding significant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 3) The warming is nearly inevitably going to show up somewhere. There is no rebuttal to this simple set of facts, other than to hypothesize a lot of negative feedbacks which would somehow save the day.
Yes, there were the denialist websites, packed with anomalous data and spurious interpretations, unfurled and hyped with the goal of flooding the debate zone with confusion. But mostly what we got was the low-rent strategy of saying “WHERE’S THE WARMING??” Subthemes were, on a warm winter day to smirk “If this is Global Warming, I’ll take it!” How do you argue with logic such as this? You can’t.
But now, with weather patterns coming visibly unglued, somehow the deniers mouths have become gluey. Oh, sure, they have retreated to “climate changes all the time,” but this is a terribly weak argument and they know it.
The silence you hear now is the drip drip drip of behind-the-scenes re-strategizing. They know climate action is coming now, and their problem is how to derail or postpone the bulk of it.
They will come up with something. Watch as the glacier retreats to see what it reveals.
Toles brings real edge to his work, and his love for the natural world shines through:
Kit Stolz 