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Brad at Sadly, No! takes on the latest gibberings from wingnut blogger Ace of Spaces on why climate change is just like Scientology...or something. At any rate good ol' Ace actually links to this graph and actually says this:

Another claim is made that global temperature records haven’t changed… much. Well, “global temperature records” are something of a myth. Only two areas of the world — the US and Europe, of course — bothered to keep extensive, systematic temperature records for the past 100 years, and of those two, we now know that at least one now shows absolutely no upward trend line in temperature at all.

Absolutely none? Well, I’m not quite sure about that. But I don’t see a major obvious trendline here...

And we are left to wonder what in the name of god is wrong with this guy? I mean, seriously, is he really just so numbingly thick headed or such a slave to his ideology that he'd insist on the existence of unicorns so long as a liberal argued against them? I just cannot comprehend how someone can look at a graph that clearly shows an upward trend and insist that he doesn't see it.

Of course he doesn't link to the mean temperatures graph which makes it all so obvious that I doubt even his addle-pated cronies could talk themselves out of it. Then again, wingnuts do seem to surpass my expectations fairly frequently in this regard...

Many of the commentors on the thread seem to have the same problem I do:

stringonastick:

You know, as a scientist I am truly hobbled when dealing with these people because at my core is the belief that if someone is shown the data, they will understand. Obviously I’ve failed Wingnut101.

You could bring these morons sunburned, dehydrated, and starving to the oasis, but if they see it as a LIBERAL oasis, they’d rather die than drink.

Specialist G in comments:

Easy now, maybe we should give the wingnuts the benefit of the doubt on this one. Their track record on scientific “controversies” IS pretty strong. They were right about lead in paint not posing a health risk to kids, weren’t they? OK, bad example. But you have to concede that they carried the day on the whole cigarettes don’t cause cancer argument. What? Oh… Well, remember when they told us taking the lead out of gas wouldn’t reduce air pollution but WOULD destroy the auto industry? No? How about when they told us that CFCs didn’t eat the ozone no matter what those Nobel laureates said and even if it did we’d never be able to have ceese-whiz in a can without them. Well, they were right about Terry Schiavo weren’t they? Uh, second-hand smoke?

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The Poorman figures it out:

This morning it hit me: the one thing Karl Rove cares about, when it comes his buddy Dubya, is influence. When he runs the poll numbers he wants them to be important, maybe the single most important factor in the President’s decision making. The Iraq War? Immigration? Social Security? Sure, these were major policy disasters, but you could at least make a plausible case that they’d help Bush and the GOP win over somebody or other. But what if Bush, on the advice of other, creepier members of his inner circle, was about to do something that was not only cataclysmically stupid, but wildly unpopular? What if Bush was about to completely torpedo the GOP for the next fifty years in pursuit of a frankly loopy goal, and Karl Rove not only knew it, but had been loudly complaining about it for months? What if Gee Dub simply wouldn’t listen to Karl, his most trusted advisor (armed, as ever, with copious polls), warning his old friend that he held a noose, not a lifeline, begging him not to cinch it quite so snugly about the frail, tubercular neck of their once proud, once shared dream of permanent Republican majority? Maybe then Turd Blossom would pack it in. So what could Bush be planning to do? What’s so much dumber than all the dumb things these dumbshits have done? Who in his administration could be giving Bush even worse advice on how to run the country than Rove was? Oh, right:

"If you’re wondering what the administration is up to in declaring a large part of Iran’s military a terrorist organization, there’s some pretty convincing analysis here that it’s a way to make an attack on Iran seem authorized by the Authorizations to Use Military Force passed by congress in ‘01 and ‘02 for attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The linked post also argues that this is a sign that the war-mongering Cheney faction is once again ascendant."