Global warming deniers lose a pet argument.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Environmental Intelligence

For the small cadre of fossil-fuel industry apologists who have continued to insist that global warming is not happening, an often-recited argument has been refuted.

Over the past decade or so, contrarians like Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg had managed to sow confusion among the public, claiming first that global warming is a myth perpetuated by environmentalists, and later (when the fast-melting polar ice cap and other evidence made that position dramatically indefensible) that if the planet is warming, it is doing so because of natural climate cycles, not human activity. When solid evidence forced them to abandon that position as well, they shifted to the argument that even if warming is human-caused, it would be economically prohibitive to try to do anything to stop it.

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Throughout all this...