In the City of Games, gambling that climate change isn't happening

Climate deniers are taking their anti-science shenanigans to Vegas

LINDSAY ABRAMS, Salon

So here’s the deal. The latest report for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the “accepted global authority on climate change,” is out, and it’s concluded that the effects of climate change are both already being experienced and expected to get worse. At this point, warned Secretary of State John Kerry, “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

And while the world (hopefully) tries to figure out what to do, the climate deniers (or as they like to be called, “skeptics”), are going to Vegas.

Spearheaded by the Koch brothers-affiliated Heartland Institute, which the Economist named “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change,” the 9th International Conference on Climate Change is being held this July at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. It coincides with the release of the latest volumes in the group’s “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)” report. Both the report and the conference are an attempt to pretend that denying the basic science of man-made climate change has any legitimacy (it doesn’t), as well as a handy excuse for the right-wing media to pretend it’s giving the issue balanced representation (it isn’t).

(Continued here.)