Toles rant: Fool's cold edition

It's cold out! Where's your global warming now? Was this EVER funny? Or is it the wit of a grinning fool? It's hard to think of another word to describe climate change deniers, who have been infesting the comments section here again this week. So I'll stick with fool. Here's the case:

From the start, climate science has reasonably postulated that a large increase CO2, an established heat-trapping gas, could cause a significant shift in the climate that would otherwise not occur. The risks forecast included massive environmental shocks that could affect everything from agriculture to oceans to virtually every ecosystem and its species. This would, on its face, argue for prudence in carbon production, and taking simple, cost-effective steps to reduce it on a long-term basis, until the data suggested the plausible threat had abated, for one reason or another. We chose not to do this for the past couple of decades. Now the science is only more conclusive, and we are still resisting even the reasonable, prudent, risk-hedging responses on the hope, the now willfully-blind hope, that the science is not just imperfect, but ASSUREDLY, COMPLETELY and DELIBERATELY wrong, that in fact it is a purposeful, lying hoax.

The people who have embraced this hallucinogenic all-or-nothing-at-all analysis, have perhaps succeeded in delaying a response to the point where it is now too late. They exult in their certainties and relish each ludicrous joke they make about the subject. The result will be what it will be, and they will have been its handmaidens. There is a word for those who have generated the denialist propaganda (hello Fox News memo) to serve their current profits and pleasure at the expense of the planet and all its ecosystems. Cynics. And there is a word for people who will not take even minimal precautionary steps in the face of large threats and are boastful about it. Fools. --Tom Toles
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/tomtoles/