"If it weren�t for global warming, we�d be under an ice sheet a mile thick right now."

"He gestured toward the mountains. 'But look at us. Earth as far as the eye can see. I love global warming! And I love you!' Something about the implied comparison made me nervous. I was pretty bad as wives go. Where Stephen was concerned possibly epoch-rending, world-destroying bad. But without me he�d be under an ice sheet, so maybe I was doing him a favor. It was plausible. It was also not enough. I said I wasn�t ready. But I had sex with him, feeling like a very dutiful wife."

From Nell Zink's novel "The Wallcreeper."

"Obama�s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial."

A NYT op-ed.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it�s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia...

And the White House gave Shell the license....

This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn�t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.

"Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge..."

"... because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it�or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs."

Wrote F.A. Hayek in "Why I Am Not a Conservative," quoted by Jonathan Adler at The Volokh conspiracy in a post titled "What does it take to convince libertarians and conservatives that climate change is a problem?"

"To many Democrats and professors at Harvard, Mr. Tribe is a traitor."

Says this NYT article, "Laurence Tribe Fights Climate Case Against Star Pupil From Harvard, President Obama":

�The administration�s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,� Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe�s brief on the Harvard Law School website. �Were Professor Tribe�s name not attached to them, no one would take them seriously.�...

[A] number of legal scholars and current and former members of the Obama administration say that Mr. Tribe has eroded his credibility by using his platform as a scholar to promote a corporate agenda � specifically, the mining and burning of coal.

�Whether he intended it or not, Tribe has been weaponized by the Republican Party in an orchestrated takedown of the president�s climate plan,� said one former administration official.

Tribe says that he's "very comfortable" representing Peabody Energy, because the arguments he needs to make "happened to coincide with what I believe." The NYT provides a quote to cast doubt on Tribe's veracity...

�That a leading scholar of constitutional matters has identical views as officials of a coal company � that his constitutional views are the same as the views that best promote his client � there�s something odd there,� said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

... and a prediction of his social death...

The Republicans who are citing Mr. Tribe�s work are not surprised. Mr. McKenna, the Republican lobbyist, said dryly, �He�s about to be banned from a lot of cocktail parties.�

Oh, you poor man, now the only friends you'll have are friends nobody wants. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande said:

"Were Professor Tribe�s name..."

I first read that as referring to the name of a tribe of "Were-professors," who attack when the moon is full.

"These five barriers, or Five D�s if you will, are all substantial and unyielding."

"Taken together they may seem invincible. They are interrelated, but still distinct. Think of them as concentric circles around the citadel of the self, with distance as the first line of defense and identity as the final, innermost defense."

The anti-climate movement has been successful in triggering each of these barriers in its battle against climate science. But inadvertently, climate communicators have activated them, too, for instance by conveying climate facts through abstract graphs and long time lines, using framing that backfires, not linking risks to opportunities for action, relying on bad storytelling, and provoking self-protective and cultural cognition by unnecessary polarization....

"But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously."

"Besides being a ready-made meme, it�s usefully imponderable: while peer-reviewed scientific estimates put the annual American death toll of birds from collisions and from outdoor cats at more than three billion, no individual bird death can be definitively attributed to climate change (since local and short-term weather patterns have nonlinear causes). Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing. Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. To demand a ban on lead ammunition (lead poisoning is the foremost cause of California condor deaths) would alienate hunters. To take an aggressive stand against the overharvesting of horseshoe crabs (the real reason that the red knot, a shorebird, had to be put on the list of threatened U.S. species this winter) might embarrass the Obama Administration, whose director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in announcing the listing, laid the blame for the red knot�s decline primarily on 'climate change,' a politically more palatable culprit. Climate change is everyone�s fault�in other words, no one�s. We can all feel good about deploring it."

Writes Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker article titled "Carbon Capture/Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?"

Al Franken: "Climate change? It's not real."