Everyone knows that trying to control the climate by reducing CO2 emissions is a joke -- or at least, everyone knows it who is not completely deluded by climate zealotry.  But this is one of those jokes that you're not allowed to laugh at.  Instead, you must listen to terribly earnest people telling you how desperately important this is to "save the planet," even as you know that the whole thing is completely preposterous and you are struggling to suppress uncontrolled snickering.  Should you respond by making fun of them?  If so -- and if you don't want to risk physical violence -- you had better do it in a way that they are too blinded to understand.  Fortunately, this is much easier than you might think.

The strategy of making fun of the zealots seems to have been adopted recently by many of those on the receiving end of the zealotry.  Prominent among these have been the major oil companies, who have found themselves the targets of shareholder activists, as well as of lawsuits from various city and county governments in California, New York and elsewhere.  Other notable contributors to the humor include developing countries like China and India.   

Consider first some of the back-and-forth between shareholder activists and the major oil companies.  As we have gone through annual meeting season, all of the majors have found themselves attacked by shareholders demanding that they "do something" to reduce emissions and save the planet.  Many of the activists come from places like state and city pension funds, which by the way are not small shareholders.  Are these activists so dumb that they don't realize that the companies they have invested in are in the oil business, the whole purpose of which is to produce fossil fuels to get burned into CO2?  It would certainly seem so.

Perhaps you think that science, of all things, should be above politics.  After all, the whole idea of the scientific method is to divorce our efforts to understand the physical world from the misdirecting influences of political power and groupthink.  In science, there is only one relevant question:  Does the best available evidence support or refute the hypothesis at hand?  How could politics possibly get mixed up in that?

The simple answer is, this is human affairs.  And in human affairs, when money and power are at stake (and sometimes, even when they are not), people are going to form themselves into teams and tribes to fight it out.  Evidence?  What's that?

You probably have seen polls showing very large gaps in opinions on the subject of "climate change" between Republicans and Democrats.  For example, this Gallup poll from March found that 66% of Democrats "worry a great deal about climate change," while only 18% of Republicans do so.  That's rather a huge divide, although not quite complete polarization.  

However, as things are now playing out in our Congress and in the courts, the polarization on the issue of climate change is nearing one hundred percent.  Democrats are in complete unanimity in declaring climate change to be a crisis and demanding massive government-directed "solutions," while Republicans have fewer and fewer non-skeptics in their ranks.  I'm old enough to remember that the Republican presidential candidates in both 2008 (McCain) and 2012 (Romney) had drunk the climate Kool Aid.  (I actually went to a fund-raiser for Romney in 2012, only to hear him deliver a talk that was largely about how he was going to solve the climate crisis by some kind of new coercive regime.)  Those days are over.  Can anybody name a member of the younger generation of Republicans in Congress who is not a skeptic?