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.” 

How can Steve declare the non-existence of something he cannot define?

And what on Earth enables him  understand its physical attributes? 

Only a far gone solipsist would deny the physical existence, form and function of the instruments scientists and engineers have devised to reproducibly measure “whatever that is ?” 

 Not far from K Street Steve will find the Naval Observatory, where the Oceanographer of the Navy  can tell him how many wars have been won by reliance on the cogency and coherence of the atmospheric sciences, and also how many 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, which  Humboldt was  made scientifically compelling by relating temperature and elevation in biogeography, and kickstarting the monumental compilation of data that led to the discovery of the  physical causes of climate change.

While Steve is free to shun science in  the interest of credible denial, lobbyists paid to wax counterfactual earn negative credibility as well. 

 He  might as well tell us to reject the  so-called theory of  “plate tectonics” because it is an affront to the power of the  pre-Socratic Gods that invites the wrath of  earth-shaking 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’

Best Englished ad  " I don’t know and I damn well refuse to find out."