Again, I'm trying for the benefit of the doubt, which is a bit odd when we are talking about climate deniers who seem to have no doubt. But we now have insurance companies actively looking at how climate change will affect their business, and energy companies pushing nuclear energy as the clean green alternative (yes, I agree, no benefit of the doubt for them), and even the Terminator trying to prevent an early termination for the planet. And yet the trolls on HuffPo go on and on denying, go on frothing at the keyboard as each new piece of evidence locks the total jigsaw into place. And I ask myself, when will they stop?
The beginning of World War two is often referred to, in a totally inappropriate analogy with the infinitely long war on various techniques used by numerous very different groups throughout history (the ILWVTNVRDGTH, sometimes called, incorrectly, the GWOT), as an example, perhaps the example, of the dangers of appeasement. I'm sure most of the trolls and neocons who use this term just have a particular key on the keyboard set to automatically insert 'appeasement' and have little if any idea of what actually happened in the late 1930s.
I'm not going to write the whole story here (see http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/31/rumsfelds_misuse_of_history.php for a recent discussion) but the main points are: German occupation of the Rhineland, German action in the Spanish Civil War, German invasion and annexation of Austria, German invasion and breakup of Czechoslovakia, German invasion of Poland. Each of these stepping stones, except the one in Spain, was justified by Hitler in terms of Germany's interests, and the interests of Germans living in those countries.
That is, at every point, it was possible for politicians and people in other European countries to tell themselves that this was rational and justified behavior, Hitler would stop when he had protected the interests of German people in central Europe. It was only with the invasion of Poland that this delusion was shattered, and Britain and France declared war.
The climate deniers are much like the general public in Britain in the 1930s. War was unthinkable, and therefore could not happen, and therefore each step on the road to war had to be seen as an end point, not as a process. Similarly, for climate deniers, the specter of a world laid waste by global warming is unthinkable, doesn't accord with their belief in either religion or capitalism, and therefore can't be happening.
So each step along the way - rising CO2 levels, increasing storm frequency, rising ocean acidity, shrinking glaciers, changing breeding seasons and distributions of plants and animals, rising sea levels, record heat waves, species extinctions - is seen as a one off, unrelated to anything before and anything to come. Each is rationalised in some way, explained away like the invasion of the Rhineland or Austria or Czechoslovakia.
So one has to ask - what will be the 'Poland moment' for climate deniers? All North American glaciers gone? The Greenland ice cap disappearing? Major Indian and Chinese and South American rivers drying up? A series of Katrina-size storms all within a few weeks? Extended drought over the whole mid west farming area? The Arctic ice cap completely gone? Temperatures over 120 degrees? New York flooded? Millions dying in Africa? Pacific islands disappearing? The Antarctic continent reduced to bare land?
At some point the delusions of the people will be shattered, this is not business as usual, and people will rise up and demand that their governments go to war on climate change. The GWOCC. And they will look for their Churchillian leader, someone who, like Churchill in the 1930s, could see the future.
That Poland moment had better come soon, and that leader.