Climate change couch potatoes

I'll let others deal with the latest column from George Will.¹ I'd rather point out a couple of comments about the Cato Institute's recent attempt to suggest that the consensus on climate change is wrong. As Brad Plumer points out, they got it all wrong. If you don't have time to read the whole post at RealClimate, just take a look at the graph to the left (from the World Meteorological Association, click on the image for a full-size version) and ask yourself if this sentence seems consistent with the evidence:

Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.

No. Well it doesn't sound consistent with the evidence to me either. Maybe that's why Ryan Avent wrote this:

That is to say, confronted by a problem demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter....

A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having. If I were a part of a movement that demanded I not get out of the way of oncoming cars, and that challenged the conclusion of the fields of physics and biology that an impact between the car and my person would leave my person badly damaged, I would begin to suspect that this movement was maybe full of crazy people with very bad ideas. I suspect most people, and perhaps nearly all people would arrive at this conclusion. And if that movement couldn't come up with a better way to approach the problem of the oncoming car, well, it would eventually find itself abandoned, destroyed by the insistent encroachment of reality.