Invasion of the editor-snatchers

Holy hell! Where are the editors of the Oklahoman?!? After running a typical uninformed layman's nonsensical critique of climate change scientists, I figured that would be it. But amazingly, the paper just ran not one but two letters defending climate change! It's incredible!! And what's great is that both destroyed the Mr. McInnis' truly cringe-worthy reference to Galileo. Originally, he wrote,

Consensus in science is what put Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the sun didn't revolve around Earth.

This is stupefyingly dumb. But as Joseph Maness of Weatherford replied, "it wasn't scientific consensus that placed Galileo under house arrest. It was religious belief." Similarly, Paul Franson of Oklahoma City noted that,

Actually, Galileo was persecuted by religious leaders, not scientists, precisely because he backed Copernicus' use of scientific evidence to postulate something that didn't fit in with keeping those leaders in power. It's not just a consensus of opinion that global climate change is real; it's the conclusion to the application of the scientific method in 13,950 peer-reviewed published scientific articles versus 23 peer-reviewed published scientific articles that rejected climate change (1991-2012).

Boom.

But amazingly, after a mind-bogglingly (even for the Oklahoman) fact-free editorial throwing out lies about climate change, the editors (or, the editors' alien abductors?) ran a letter challenging their lies! As James Stovall of Oklahoma City rightly notes,

According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded for the continental United States. More than 24,000 record highs were set in the United States alone. Unprecedented and disastrous weather events like Hurricane Sandy are on the increase and are costing the U.S. economy trillions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Of the nine hottest years on record, eight have occurred since 2000.

How the editors could write that "temperatures [have] stopped rising, defying the projections of supposed environmental experts," in the face of actual facts is incredible enough. But that they would then run a letter correcting them is almost unheard of!!

One suspects that this is all just a set-up for the classic point/counter-point letter situation that the paper loves to do. Indeed, it's likely that by Sunday, we will see a flurry of letters-- all written by uneducated laypeople-- noting how climate change is a hoax. That, or the editors really have been abducted, in which case we welcome our new more rationally-minded overlords.