(Bloomberg) — On Tuesday, I asked why Republicans are so much less likely than Democrats to worry about climate change, and wondered if the answer wasn't an aversion to more government spending and regulation.
Readers, or at least those who wrote the 1,800 or so comments on the piece, felt differently. The argument that many of them offered — that man-made climate change is some sort of hoax, perpetuated by scientists looking for research money — deserves consideration, because it underlines what makes the U.S. climate debate so divisive and protracted. It also demonstrates why that debate seems to be immune from scientific resolution.
Maybe the most common response was that the climate is always changing, which has nothing to do with human activity. Here's how the reader Harlan Roberts put it:
There is a 1,500 year climate cycle that has been going on here on Earth for at least 400K years. That was proven with data from the Antarctic ice core sample. The ice core sample from Greenland was smaller so we could only go back 250K years for the Northern Hemisphere. This cycle is not driven by humans. It's the Sun.
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