The Inconvenient Truth: Inconvenient!

Warned by Kevin Drum to expect the worst, I wound up needing to read Emily Yoffe's op-ed on global warming three times to try to figure out what she's saying. In essence, it seems that she doesn't want to dispute the fact that carbon emissions are contributing to climate change in a problematic way or that this provides us with a reason to hope for changes in our policies. Nevertheless, she wishes that Al Gore and other warmingmongers would just keep quiet about it because, well, all this talk of catastrophe is a downer.

So here's a deal. All Yoffe needs to do is convince politicians from oil, coal, gas, and automobile manufacturing states, plus conservative politicians generally, plus the leaders of large countries in the developing world like China and India, that global warming is really bad and that hearing about it is a drag. Then, with all those guys on board, we'll lick the problem super-fast and everyone can stop talking about it.