Two years ago, in the home stretch of our last presidential election, Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles and I published a book about climate change denial (“The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”). Denialism was still a major problem, we argued.
Fixing the headline would be simple (just remove “but Not”), but the op-ed itself is irreparable, constituting little more than a litany of denialist talking points. No, ice is not accumulating on Earth—it is melting.
With a climate change denier in the White House, climate denialism has reached a new low point in America. Indeed, my co-author Tom Toles and I have devoted a whole new chapter to the matter ("Return to the Madhouse: Climate Change Denial in the Age of Trump") in the new paperback edition of our book The Madhouse Effect (now available for pre-order).
There is a quantity known as the "Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity" or "ECS" that serves as a traditional measure of the warming effect of greenhouse gases. The ECS characterizes the total warming we would expect from a doubling of the concentration of greenhouse gases (e.g. from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million to the 560 ppm level that would be expected by the middle of this century if we continue with the unabated burning of fossil fuels) once the climate system fully adjusts to this increase.
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