I remember years ago seeing an ad that promoted the safety of nuclear energy. This ad was of a green thriving forest, that, according to the ad copy, once hosted a nuclear explosion of some sort. The point of the ad was to insinuate that nuclear explosions were a natural occurrence, and hadn’t really hurt anyone, so why are we worried about nuclear power stations? After all we are not as irresponsible as nature as to put all the nuclear material in one place?
We see the same thing happening now with climate change. We all know that the Earth’s average temperature fluctuates naturally, so why worry about some fluctuation now? Aren’t the current variation just part of the natural cycle?
Randall Munroe of XKCD has a response to climate change deniers. Monroe has a knack for distilling massive quantities of information into a cartoon that even Edward Tufte might find compelling. In the past he has explained the Saturn V Rocket and even partisan congress.
In this case the graphic clearly shows that for the past 10,000 years the average temperature of the Earth has been within a degree celsius and the changes of temperature before that were due to, for example, physical changes in the orientation of the Earth and Sun. The 2°C we are going to see over the next hundred years is not due natural changes, but to human impact on the environment.
Unfortunately as most of the climate deniers are people of blind faith, and do not have human experience as part of their spiritual sources, evidence, even evidence presently so beautifully, is not likely to sway them.