By Donna Laframboise, from her Facebook page

This photo is making the rounds at the moment. People I love and admire have posted it. Good people. Kind people. So I’m going to try to explain why it’s counter productive.

As a journalist I have followed the climate debate closely for a decade. When I research a topic, I dig deep. I assure you, it has never been the position of skeptics that ‘climate change isn’t real.’ That is a fundamental misrepresentation.

The climate has always changed. The last Ice Age was a mere 12,000 years ago. From this perspective, the claim that climate change is ‘caused by humans’ strikes skeptics as profoundly scientifically illiterate, a case of puny humanity exaggerating its importance on a planet whose climate was doing its own thing *billions* of years before humans even appeared.

The real question is: What portion of current climate change is caused by humanity?

Despite research costing billions, science cannot answer this question. The UN’s climate body can only say it’s the *opinion* of its experts that humanity is responsible for an unspecified *majority* of change since 1950.

I’ve written 2 books about that UN climate body. Its purpose is to play midwife to UN climate treaties, therefore it would love to phrase things more concretely. It cannot. Hard evidence just isn’t there.

There is now a long history of environmental doom mongering, of dire predictions pre-dating even the 1960s and 1970s, that have *always* failed to materialize. From that perspective, climate skeptics know their history & have learned from it.

How many failed predictions of eco-apocalypse are necessary before those who approach climate change with healthy skepticism are no longer dismissed as morons?

Belittling people, distorting their position so that they look stupid, gets us nowhere. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind. It doesn’t promote mutual respect. Instead it wounds, it insults, it polarizes.