Via KOS + Forbes.

As veteran climate reporter David Roberts noted recently, their success in blocking changes is not based on facts or even the “alternative facts” cooked up by the fossil-fuel propagandists over the past 25 years. Rather they’ve adopted a strategy of disputing the authority of the vast majority of scientists with climate-related credentials. You can’t trust ‘em is the message they’ve spread, assisted by right-wing radio and traditional media that have, until recently, refused to treat their claims with the disdain they deserve. However, just in case access to relevant information might change a few minds, the Trump regime is determined to curtail the collection of climate facts and expunge already collected ones from government websites.

If facts guided policy, the nation would long ago have taken seriously the conclusions of the first climate model developed half a century ago. Ethan Siegel has written about that 1967 model at Forbes. It was developed by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald “and they got almost everything exactly right”:

The title of their paper, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (full download for free here), describes their big advances: they were able to quantify the interrelationships between various contributing factors to the atmosphere, including temperature/humidity variations, and how that impacts the equilibrium temperature of Earth. Their major result, from 1967?

According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO2 content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2 °C.

ie even pre-TeaPartiers: assholes trod the raped-planet Earth. And reproduced horrifyingly until they became The Plurality.

RIP Age of Reason.
Do not drink any {more} Free Koolaid.