Climate Change Deniers: Debunk or Ignore?

In 28 days that cannot go by fast enough, the United States will have a president who in word and deed, seems hell-bent on throttling global warming. If past actions are good guides, Barack Obama's nominees will be bringing the appropriate urgency on climate action with them into the nation's top energy and environment posts.

So should we continue to debunk the global warming deniers, or hope that they'll fade back to the fringes of national energy, environment, transportation, and agriculture policies?

The think tanks, oil companies and front groups who've so successfully paralyzed climate policy for a decade or more -- these are professionals who prize ideology over good science and facts, or have obvious conflicts of interest. (There are $14.83 billon worth of reasons in the last financial quarter alone why ExxonMobil would want to subvert better fuel efficiency standards for cars. This, at least, is a comprehensible capitalist motivation.)

It's unlikely these groups and companies will change their tunes -- in fact, confronted with well-deserved marginalization on global warming policy, they're likely to yell louder than ever.

So to the extent that they continue to get bad information into the news, or subvert laws and regulations meant to protect public health and the environment, they will need to be kept in sight and debunked at every turn.

But what about the citizens they've managed to fool? By preying on fear of an uncertain future, and creating (and exploiting) mistrust of science and scientists, the professional deniers have convinced a lot of people that global warming isn't real; that transformation for the better isn't possible; and that anyone who believes otherwise is The Enemy.

On the one hand -- whatever. Answering denier talking points is usually akin to playing whack-a-mole.

On the other (and this is no doubt the idealist in me), isn't it wrong to marginalize millions of people, just because they were suckered by an undeniably accomplished disinformation campaign? Efforts like transitioning from dirty to clean energy, and doing it fast, will need a strong national commitment. It will be so much easier if we don't have to argue so much about why it needs to happen.

Image: Image of Category 5 Hurricane Katrina taken by NASA’s Terra satellite at 1:00 p.m. EDT on August 28, 2005, the day before it hit New Orleans. NASA image courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Team at Goddard Space Flight Center.