The climate myth rebuttal published this week was the 50th in a long list of updated rebuttals.

Besides that, there are more than 25 in the queue for publication and newly-drafted rebuttals are accumulating at a rate of 1-2 per week as we churn our way through the long list of science-denial’s talking points. So it’s time for a short reflective post.

Because many of these rebuttals are of a pre-2010 vintage, it’s sad to have to record that many have needed a total rewrite. Not because they are ‘bad’ or anything like that. At the time of their original publication, they were highly accurate snapshots of the situation. It’s just that more than 14 years have passed, far too little has been done to address the climate crisis and emissions (plus CO2 levels) have continued to track dramatically upwards. Also, there’s a lot of new science to read, digest and explain. This all takes time.

Out-datedness cuts both ways, though. Many of the quotes from science-deniers – the myths presented in the beige-colored box above each rebuttal — are of a similar vintage. Often, they involved confidently-made predictions, such as “we have entered a long-term cooling period.”

Fast forward to now and it’s obvious that many such confident predictions were one hundred percent wrong. Whether the deniers were aware of that at the time is an interesting philosophical question. Did they know they would be proven wrong but simply didn’t care – or were they so convinced they were right that physics simply caught up with them in the end? Or a mixture? Discuss!