The facts about human-caused global climate change have not changed: it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s a bitch. Also, because we are collectively burdened with an utterly dysfunctional political system which allows undue influence to liars, fools, cowards, weenies, loudmouths, hacks, charlatans, and absolute dickweeds, the chances of the American government taking positive action to deal with this crisis are remote.

So if you have kids and grandkids, apologize to them now for the trashed planet they’re bound to inherit. I myself am stockpiling whiskey supplies for my toddlers. When they’re my age, they’ll put them to excellent use. I just have to make sure they know enough not to contaminate the stuff with water, which will be larded up with amoebas and bacteria and so forth which is unlikely to be particularly flavorful and will by then likely have sufficiently evolved to become microscopic alcoholic life-forms. Why should us mammals have all the fun.

Anyhow it’s worth noting the incredibly shoddy — and loathsome — quality of the attacks on the science, and the scientists doing it. These attacks have lately originated in the British gutter press, from whence they get picked up in the American gutter right blogosphere, are squawked over by the American gutter Republican party, and are thence laundered into semi-respectability by the American gutter Washington Post.

At any rate, if you want to know what is actually going on with the science and the lying about the science, RealClimate explains it all.

It’s important. Go read it.