Benighted

I dunno. Sometimes even halfway-intelligent folks like Jay Currie simply lose their minds.

Look, I'm a bit of a cynic myself--gestures like Earth Hour do raise awareness, but in my opinion it will take some serious if not catastrophic environmental crises to wake people up to the point that anything serious is done. Why do I say that? Because even people with a few brains--Jay Currie, for example--are so blinded by ideology and prejudice that they think it's funny to try to sabotage a mild little effort like this. It's rather like deliberately scattering garbage when the neighbourhood is going on a clean-a-thon, or taking a dump in your local river when locals are lobbying for anti-pollution measures.

What, I sometimes wonder, would it really take to break through the layers of self-deception and obstinacy that make conservatives think it's cute to put high-wattage lamps on during Earth Hour? I'm not even sure about serious environmental crises, come to think of it. We're in one, after all, and the assorted hicks and rubes (with their smart-ass vanguard) are still snickering and guffawing. I can imagine this sorry handful of know-nothings in the days of the Great Flood, sitting around drinking beer, laughing at Noah and hiding the unicorns.

I guess all we can do is plow gamely on, as the science progresses, and the climatological equivalents of Peter Duesberg shriek against the increasingly obvious, and the yahoos turn up their lights and rev their motorcycles and engage in all kinds of nutty "dissent." That kind of blind reaction, as we know, never grows old.

I'm glad we beat smallpox into the ground, and I'm kind of hoping we do the same with global warming. I would like my great-grandkids to live to see the denialists archived in Wikipedia, their scribblings and foamings, their pseudo-science and conspirazoid thinking, preserved only there and in yellowing pamphlets and long-defunct blogsites, more grist for the mill of historians of anti-ideas and ideologically-driven fads. And for that alone, I'll make the token gesture tonight.