I am so fucking tired of every tiny, poorly understood anomaly being held up as evidence that global warming is either a hoax or just plain not happening.  Today, evidence that glaciers on Mt. Shasta and Mt. Rainier are expanding is the latest cudgel against the future of human life on earth.  This is a result of a warmer Pacific Ocean and a warmer atmosphere, with the attendant increases on moisture, settling on high elevations in the form of increased snowfall–and is at best a temporary phenomenon, as the rising snow line will eventually deplete them.

Worse yet are the people who believe the climate is probably changing but insist that humans have contributed nothing and that it’s just part of the earth’s natural ebb and flow.  Well, even if that were the case, you can’t really accept that there’s much to gain by the acidic, fishless oceans expanding twenty feet up by century’s end.  That’s an “if I fuck a virgin, my HIV will go away” level of comprehension.

Probably no small part of this comes from a general antipathy towards scientists and nerds.  Just as conservatives relish anything that “annoys liberals,” their rallies to the defense of dare-I-say “traditional” gender roles bleeds way out of a hatred for teh gay.  Americans are acculturated to revile non-feminine women and non-masculine men, and that doesn’t only mean butch dykes and girlyboys.  Smart chicks and awkward men–the stereotypical people who populate the hard sciences–quietly dwell in the shadow of sports-worship and presidencies won by clearing brush.

That they don’t inherently engage in threatening sexual practices spares them the rod.  But scientists are generally quite liberal–and extremely secular.  I’m kind of surprised that more Christians aren’t riding the current slippage in popular belief in climate change.  It’s kind of like Dan Savage’s point about Christians coming after straight rights.  Peter LaBarbera and James Dobson might hate faggots most, but they would outlaw blowjobs and contraception and chip away at women’s financial independence if they could.

Prurient obsessions with other people’s sex lives and the insistence that all boys catch a football are seriously damaging.   And what do those dorks know about glaciers, anyway?