It's called 'motivated reasoning', but I doubt these idiots have ever heard of it.
Must be a conservative state, because this peculiar strain of stupidity is generally right-wing in nature. It's all about me! me!! me!! and screw the consequences, especially for the environment, our grandkids, or poor people.
Someone is winging it here. Right-wing left-wing it is necessary to read the 400+ pages.
I am only half way into this and it carves out an agenda ignoring any dialogue.
Many of the statements of fact are the current conclusions of science in progress.
As works in progress the conclusions should not be so boldly presented as fact.
This alone will cause people that know or think they know to reject the agenda.
Remember correlation is not proof of causality.
http://io9.com/our-new-favorit...
Omitted in this is a solid anchor to mathematics which is covered by others.
There is a bit of hand waving about iterative modeling and CO2 cycles,
weather and more but after discussing iterative modeling some conclusions
become fact.
I happen to be old enough to have been taught "geosynclinal theory of mountain building" as if it
was fact. Yet in the afternoon of my final exam I sat in a seminar by J. Tuzo Wilson and some
of his students on Plate Technics. I am also old enough to recall when 1inch was defined
as 2.54cm EXACTLY and the difference between the old and new can matter.
An old boss of mine (in Wyoming) kept a cartoon behind clear plastic on his desk. It had
one man with a gift package labeled "Truth"... the next panel had the same character
with a gift package labeled "New Truth". Stuff changes....
There is an interesting management problem that may apply to this. In an exercise
teams are given topics to advocate for and against. Then the team that "wins" gets to
debate another team up a ladder. The observation and point of the exercise is that
as an agenda moved up through the process the position gets less and less flexible.
In as little as three cycles some "managers" in this class got so invested in the position
they were given that fists get brandished.
The further folk get from the sciences and more invested they get with a position
the sillier they can appear to someone looking at it with the eyes of a child.
Watch the old and new Cosmos -- Neil deGrasse Tyson is MUCH more invested
in the same positions that Carl Sagan was. Neil transforms conclusions into facts.
Conclusions that I agree with but facts.... no.... the "New Truth" beckons tomorrow.
Enough rambling.
The US coal and natural gas resources are large. Ignore this and people will
die of heat or cold or lack of water (pumps, desalination). Other nations will
be happy and aggressive in their exploitation of fossil energy and climate
will be impacted no matter what this 400+ page document authors think they
know. I know that some of the computer codes involved use "PI=3.14" and iterate
for months on many cores to get a result to 19 places to the right of the dp.