BE KIND TO YOUR FRIENDS IN THE SWAMP, FOR A DUCK MAY BE SOMEBODY'S MOTHER

For all his  “drain the swamp”  rhetoric in 2020, Donald Trump instead turned to the Beltway bayou  to staff his transition team with critters like Steve Milloy, a  registered lobbyist with Superpowers the Hulk might envy. The force of solipsism  is strong in this one. He does not hesitate to refute by proclamation anything he can’t explain or  his clients don’t like, witness this Twitter  sillygism in four parts. 

Imprimus :

• 1.” Science is not done by consensus. “

So he and noted historian Tucker Carlson keep telling us. However, even Fox viewers who  break their backs generally prefer the diagnosis of a team of neurosurgeons to a chiropractor or a K Street hack. 

• 2.” There is no evidence that the Earth's climate -- whatever that is -- is warming or at an unprecedented rate.” 

If Steve can’t define something, what on Earth enables him to declare its nonexistence, let alone understand its physical attributes?
This is solipsism at its literally idiotic worst: denying the physical existence and reproducible function of the instruments scientists and engineers have devised to reproducibly measure “whatever that is ?”  Not far from K Street is the Naval Observatory, where Steve may find the Oceanographer of the Navy who can tell him how many wars have been won by reliance on the existence and cogency of the atmospheric sciences, and how many, from the days of the Spanish Armada on, have been lost by those refusing to do so. 

• 3. “The Earth has many climates that are regional in nature. There is no evidence that any of these regional climate (sic) has changed in any meaningful or discernible way. “

That first idea is Aristotle’s, and  Humboldt was the first  to make it scientifically compelling by relating latitude and elevation in biogeography.

This led to the monumental compilation of the data that define climate change, and the century long development of the atmospheric sciences. While Steve may shun science libraries and  AGU meetings in the the interest of credible denial, the fact remains that as a lobbyist who gets paid to wax counterfactual he has earned a considerable amont of negative credibility, and absent much of the positive sort , he  might as well tell us earthquakes can’t happen because he discounts as superstitious the so-called theories of  “plate tectonics”  and the pre-Socratic "Wrath of Poseidon"

• 4.  I'm not aware of any "scientist" who has correctly predicted anything about climate. So who exactly should we consider to be a "scientist" when it comes to climate? “  

 Here Steve indulges in a fallacy so infamous that has a name: 

‘Ignoramus et ignoramibus’

AKA " I don’t know and I don’t want to find out."